A rollicking jumble of plot devices, dad jokes, literary references, existential dread, and pure, joyful silliness.
Fans of Fforde’s previous seven Thursday Next novels have been waiting 14 years for the eighth. This kaleidoscope of puns and paradoxes closes out the series—or does it?
Beginning with The Eyre Affair (2001), Fforde’s ostentatiously literary protagonist has been scrambling in and out of other novels, battling villains and causing—and solving—discontinuity problems. “Adventure and intrigue seemed to follow me around like a homesick spaniel,” she says in her current outing. At least, the novel’s first-person narrator, Thursday Next, says that; whether that’s the same thing as Thursday Next herself saying it is hard to say. Various fonts, such as Comic Sans, something like Courier, and a hard-to-read footnote type, indicate overlapping levels of metafiction. Fforde includes diary entries written by one “Jasper Fforde” and by Thursday Next as well as what purports to be an email from his own actual agent. Fforde even drags readers into it, commanding them to read particular passages aloud. In the book’s inciting incident, Thursday’s daughter, Tuesday, a teenage genius, tries out her prototype Reality Field Distortion Generator without thinking through the consequences. Those may or may not include the appearance of a new villain, Roger Thatt, who wants Thursday to get him into the Dark Reading Matter of the title—the vast underbelly of the fictional universe where lost and forgotten text lingers and disintegrates into its essential parts. Thursday, or perhaps the author she calls her “Creator,” or perhaps Fforde himself, uses the concept to interrogate the notion of art in an age of didacticism and generative AI. “What do you want with the Dark Reading Matter? Something to do with replacing authors with Word Engines?” Thursday asks Roger. He answers, “Progress, my dear girl, progress. Not just replacing authors, but using novels to ensure the correct message reaches the public. Stories inspire—we just want them to inspire correctly.” Will Jasper, Thursday, her family, and their ragtag team of comrades rescue fiction from a fate worse than oblivion? And will they ever return to battle anew? Only the Creator, or perhaps the Muses, or perhaps the Reader, can say for sure.
A rollicking jumble of plot devices, dad jokes, literary references, existential dread, and pure, joyful silliness.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781641296687
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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