Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Five years after I finished the first Thursday Next novel, The Eyre Affair, I was finally craving the next (a little Thursday goes a long way, the plots being incredibly fast paced, witty and full of literary references). I had to laugh when I opened the next book in the series, Lost in a Good Book, and found a Goliath rating of "Suitable For All" on its frontispiece (along with other tidbits such as "Violence: only on those who deserve it" and "Reading of banned books is against the law."). Goliath is the corporation that runs everything in the futuristic book-obsessed 1980s England of Thursday Next, who is a LiteraTec, or literary fraud investigator.

In Lost in a Good Book, Thursday's husband is eradicated (through the changing of past events) by a member of the time-travelling ChronoGuard who is in Goliath's pocket. In order to save her husband, Thursday must free the Goliath thug she trapped in The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe in the last book, as a sort of exchange. The problem is that her uncle's Prose Portal has disappeared right along with her uncle. Oh, and her father, a renegade member of the ChronoGuard, keeps popping up in his quest to find out why the world ends later that month. Plus, Goliath wants to know how Thursday manages to get into books.

I don't want to ruin the book by overdescribing it, but all serious book lovers who don't take their reading too seriously must read it, if only for a wonderful new perspective on Miss Havisham, and the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (formerly known as the Cheshire Cat, before certain "boundary changes" required the changing of his name).