FIRST AMONG SEQUELS

It is fourteen years since Thursday Next pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop,and the Special Operations Network has been disbanded. Using Swindon'sAcme Carpets as a front, Thursday and her colleagues Bowden, Stig andSpike continue their same professions, only illegally. Of course, thisfront is itself a front for Thursday's continued work at Jurisfiction,the Policing agency within the bookworld, and she is soon grappling with arecalcitrant new apprentice, an inter-genre war or two, and theinexplicable departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardybooks. As the Council of Genres decree that making books interactivewill boost flagging readership levels and Goliath attempt to perfect atrans-fictional tourist coach, Thursday find herself in the onerousposition of having to side with the enemy to destroy a greater evil thatthreatens the very fabric of the reading experience. With Aornis Hadesonce again on the prowl, an idle sixteen-year-old son who would rathersleep in than save the world from the end of time, a government with adangerously high stupidity surplus and the Swindon 'Stiltonistas' tryingto muscle in on her cheese-smuggling business, Thursday must once againtravel to the very outer limits of acceptable narrative possibilities totriumph against increasing odds.