Thursday Next in the Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde

(0670032891)

I love this series. The beautiful thing about it is that the author assumes you've read every book he uses to create his books, but if you haven't it doesn't matter: his plot still moves forward ok. If you have, it just makes these books so much the better.

Now, to explain is a bit difficult...

The heroine, Thursday Next, is hiding out in Fiction as she waits to find her husband, who has been killed at age two. She is slowly losing her memories of him, even as she begins to find it difficult to fit into her clothes because of her pregnancy with his child. Pickwick, her pet dodo, seems ahead of her owner in this regard; her egg, which she's been caring for over the past 2 books, finally hatches in this one.

While hiding out, Thursday is appropriated by Miss Havisham (from Great Expectations) and the entire Jurisfiction section, where she is trained to "police" fiction from inside the books just as she has always policed it from the outside. There is death, dismemberment, dis-remembering, plot repair for lousy books, and the explanation of Generic Characters, who go to school at St. Tabularasa to learn how to become less generic.

Are you confused yet? Suffice to say that Thursday saves Fiction from an evil corporation (NOT Goliath, as in the others) and reclaims her memories of her husband. We meet Prometheus (briefly) and the Minotaur (not-so-briefly, unfortunately for one character) and a very interesting British Colonial series hero married to a gorilla.

Hint: Don't read this in public unless you want to receive lots of weird looks. I started reading the first book on a train and had to suppress the snorts of laughter.

I would recommend reading this only after you've read the other two. It's less complex, but also potentially really confusing if you don't know the series plot. It's confusing even if you know the plot, but well-worth it.