My wife and I started listening to The Eyre Affair on our Thanksgiving trip and only recently finished it, but this unique novel proved quite delightful from start to finish. I'll say up front that no small portion of our enjoyment came from Elisabeth Sastre's reading. Jasper Fforde has a good narrative voice, but Sastre just plain has a good voice as the narrator of this tale. I suspect she could read the phone book with a sense of wit and charm behind the words. 
 I find it hard to give an adequate description of The Eyre Affair. To say it presents an alternate reality doesn't seem to go far enough. Sure, it's England in 1985, in a world in which the Crimean War has dragged on for 130 years or so, but I would also have to add that this alternate history is laced with a sort of surreal magic. The villain of the novel has superhuman abilities, from speed and strength to a magical ability to compel others to act as he wishes, to change his appearance. Our protagonist, Thursday Next, works for special operations (spec-ops) as a literatech, concerned with literary matters (which, on the whole, are a much bigger deal in this reality, where literature has taken on roughly religious significance, with societies devoted to various authors, literary pilgrimages seemingly commonplace, and proselytizing groups trying to convert others to their belief that, say, Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. Thursday's father is a rogue from service in a different branch of spec-ops, the Chronoguard, charged with protecting us from various sorts of disasters of time, including the deliberate sabotage of the past. 
 Without giving too much away, I'll say that the world Fforde draws is one in which not only is time travel possible, but people can also travel into books and characters can sometimes travel out of books, leading to an act of biblio-terrorism of sorts, in which a character is kidnapped from Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and murdered. As the title suggests, however, Jane Eyre ultimately becomes central to the plot. 
 On the whole, it was a wild ride, but one upon which Lauren and I were happy to embark, and we'll probably look for the next book in the series before too long.