Jasper Fforde signing at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore!

The £5 ticket cost can be used against a purchase of the headline book during the event!

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Time Bestseller list with 'The Eyre Affair' in 2001. His 18th novel, 'Dark Reading Matter', will be published in the UK/USA in 2026.

Fforde's writing is an eclectic mix of genres, which might be described as a joyful blend of Comedy-SF-thriller-Crime-Satire. He freely admits that he is fascinated not just by books themselves, but by the way we read and what we read, and his reinvigoration of tired genres have won him many enthusiastic supporters across the world.

Amongst Fforde's output are police procedurals featuring nursery rhyme characters; a four-book series for Young Adults about Magic and Dragons set in a shabby world of failing magical powers,'Shades of Grey' (2011) a post-apocalyptic dystopia where social hierarchy is based on the colours you can see, 'Early Riser' (2018), a thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated, and 'The Constant Rabbit' (2020), an allegory about racism and xenophobia in the UK.

Fforde was born in England but has recently decided to adopt the nationality of where he lives when he heard that: 'When you truly love Wales, you are Welsh'.

Dark Reading Matter

The final novel in the highly acclaimed and beloved Thursday Next series. Will Thursday find her happy ending?

Swindon-based Literary Detective Thursday Next is embarking on her eighth and final adventure: ‘Dark Reading Matter’ and she is well aware of the fact. The problem is, others are too. Old foes and new are plotting a terrible revenge: To disrupt the narrative and make Dark Reading Matter not just unreadable but unpublishable. Thursday can’t let that happen and needs to use all her guile and narrative trickery to unmask the antagonists and guide the series to a satisfactory conclusion.

It won’t be easy. The Martians have broken out of their HG Wells novel and threaten both the real world and the Bookworld. Agents from a higher reality want unfettered access to the Dark Reading Matter, the realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up. A Gateway to Hell has opened up at Wantage’s Shakesmania, the nation’s second to worst Shakespeare theme park and the cosy world of Enid Blyton has been hi-jacked by Ultra Right Wing Nationalists.

With Reality Field Distortion experiments going haywire, a partially redacted donkey, a Bookworld on the brink of losing its imaginative energy to Big Tech and a murderous stamp collector with Philaticide on their mind, Thursday has to navigate a tightrope of borderline unusable narrative devices to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion.

It’s a tall order, but Thursday has a secret weapon: Her own adaptability, her husband Landen, a host of stalwart friends and ultimately the most loyal compatriots she can call upon: Her readers.

‘Hugely funny and gloriously imaginative’ Daily Express

‘Fans of the late Douglas Adams, or, even, Monty Python, will feel at home with Fforde’ Herald