Will literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next find her happy ending? The outrageous, heartfelt conclusion to the New York Times bestselling series, which began with The Eyre Affair, will have you, Dear Reader, laughing out loud.
Ex-Literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next is embarking on her eighth and final fictional adventure, and she is well aware of the fact. The problem is, others are aware of it, too. Old foes and new are plotting a terrible revenge: to disrupt the narrative and make the last Thursday Next novel, Dark Reading Matter, not just unreadable but unpublishable. Thursday can’t let that happen, and needs to use all her guile and narrative trickery to unmask the antagonists.
It won’t be easy. The Martians have broken out of their H. G. Wells novel and threaten both the real world and the BookWorld. Agents from a higher reality want unfettered access to the Dark Reading Matter, the realm where deleted books and unrealized literary ideas end up. A Gateway to Hell has opened up at Wantage’s Shakesmania, the nation’s second-worst Shakespeare theme park, and the cozy world of Enid Blyton has been hijacked by ultra-right-wing nationalists. With Reality Field Distortion experiments going haywire, a partially redacted donkey, a BookWorld on the brink of losing its imaginative energy to Big Tech and a murderous stamp collector with philaticide on their mind, Thursday has to navigate a tightrope of borderline unusable narrative devices to bring the series to a satisfying conclusion.
It’s a tall order, but Thursday has several secret weapons: her own adaptability; her husband, Landen; a host of stalwart friends and ultimately the most loyal compatriots she can call upon—her readers.
Release date:
October 6, 2026
Publisher:
Soho Press
Print pages:
448
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I’d been gone twelve years. Too long, I thought. It was time to stretch, gather my thoughts and hop back into the fray. I didn’t know where I was headed but had confidence my Creator didn’t know either. It was better that way. Keeps us sharp. On our toes. And not in a ballet dancer sort of way. —Thursday Next, Personal Diaries
It was morning in the large manor house that we called home, a rambling and mostly rainproof Jacobean pile of rotted bricks, timbers and lime plaster held together by deluded hope and the hardened carapaces of deathwatch beetles. The ancient building had seen many wars both civil and global and had suffered badly under the hand of shifting architectural tastes, but was still charming in a how-many-times-can-I-get-lost-in-my-own-house sort of way. It had many quirks that were just curious enough to be romantic and others that were just plain vexing: a gas central heating system of such diabolical complexity that only a devil-worshipper with CORGI accreditation[1] could service, wiring that was unsafe beyond the lowest wattage bulb, plumbing that gave us water that tasted of something that wasn’t quite water and several priest holes that had a second priest hole hidden within them, so that disenfranchised priests whose doctrines were separated only by a comma within the scriptures would not have to suffer a crisis of theological disharmony.
The toast popped up and I spread some butter on it—less than I used to—and then some bespoke marmalade I had traded with Swindon’s most exclusive marmaladia for some Welsh cheese I’d received as part of a decades-old illegal cheese deal that it would not be healthy to cancel.
“Marmalade?” I said to Landen, whose turn it was not to make breakfast.
“Please.”
Landen was my husband and father of my children, my best friend and confidant all rolled into one. I couldn’t imagine life without him, so never did. He was ex-military like me and still very occasionally a writer. Although possessed of an odd sense of humour, as well as an increasingly age-related attention to small details, comfier shoes, and low-level outrage at the matters of everyday living, Landen was everything I could have wanted in a life partner. We knew each other so well that friends had jokingly suggested we go in for a local “Mr. and Mrs.” competition. One thing led to another and before we knew it we had won the Nationals, then represented England in the World Championships only to be pipped to gold by a nauseating Swedish couple from Malmö.
“Guess what?” I said.
“You’re pregnant?” he said, a standard answer.
“The foetus would have a hard time finding somewhere to gestate,” I replied, “so no.” I paused, jamming my tongue into a hole in my jaw. “It’s this: I think I’ve lost a tooth.”
“Just now?”
“Last night.”
He looked up.
“How can you lose a tooth in your sleep?”
“I don’t know,” I said, jamming a pinky into the gap, “ik guth wafnnt her in fr morbing.”
“I can’t hear you, you have your finger in your mouth.”
“It just wasn’t there in the morning,” I said, “and I didn’t find it in the bed. Could I have swallowed it?”
“Sounds more like radicalised Tooth Fairies attempting to fulfil unrealistic supply quotas.”
“Very funny.”
“If you did swallow it,” he said, “it will turn up again quite soon, I suspect.”
He chuckled and went back to his paper.
The old manor house was not all we called home. There were ninety acres of garden and mixed parkland attached to the house, with several lakes, a grotto, a cascading water feature, a temple to the Queen of the Muses, Calliope, and a real live ornamental hermit named Millon de Floss. He had managed to win an exemption from the Worshipful Grunge of Hermits to move into the house, so long as he ate only gruel, wore a flour sack and slept on boards with the window open. He promised faithfully he would do all those things, then did none of them.
“When you get your tooth back,” said Landen, “will you—”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, thank you.”
The entire property was surrounded by a high wall and security cameras, mostly to protect our daughter Tuesday’s intellectual property. She, like her great-uncle Mycroft Next, was one of the planet’s true geniuses and was always working on some exciting invention of dubious relevance but unassailable brilliance. When she wasn’t designing anti-smite shields to protect Mankind from a wrathful God, she was inventing an improved matchbox whose internal drawer was the right way up irrespective of the orientation of the outer cover, or formulating an advanced language model so speak-your-weight machines could understand better the concept of tact. More recently she had devised a proven method for counting hyperactive cats when their number is greater than nine, an intractable mathematical problem that had been considered unsolvable by no less a luminary than Sir Isaac Newton himself. She was currently engaged in some sort of field theory, and I don’t mean the sort of fields that have cows in them. Although with Tuesday, you never knew.
“Do you want to try and choose our holiday destination again?” asked Landen once he’d taken a bite of his toast and another shlurp of coffee. I said that I did. Our annual holiday plans generally consisted of a family trip with the kids, somewhere warm but not too warm, and sandy but not too sandy, then a shorter getaway just for the two of us—a sort of holiday holiday—where we could be ourselves and not worry about very much at all. We always planned to leave our mobiles and weapons at home and not tell anyone where we were. It never turned out that way, as adventure and intrigue seemed to follow me around like a homesick spaniel,[2] but we could at least try.
“Okay then,” said Landen, heaving himself to his feet.
Choosing a destination for our “without kids” holiday was very simple: a single dart and a world map. Landen would pin the map to the wall and I’d simply close my eyes, throw the dart and—so long as I hit the map and not the wall, fridge or, once, Landen’s leg—we went there, or the nearest coastal destination. In this way we’d discovered out-of-the-way places we would never have found by conventional methods. With the Gravitube’s[3] recent expansion programme, 85 percent of the planet was only twelve hours away from anywhere else. We’d dart-chosen Swakopmund once and taken the Deep Drop from Swindon’s Clary-Lamarr Travelport to Johannesburg, then an Overmantle to Windhoek and from there a bus using Namibia’s excellent public transport system and were climbing Dune 7 to watch the sun set a mere nine hours after leaving home.
It was a good holiday, as I recall, despite Landen’s being briefly kidnapped by Agents of a Foreign Power and then Doncaster’s second-best assassin, who tried to kill me. While these sorts of shenanigans were generally a welcome distraction from the often suboptimal hotel entertainments such as bingo, whist drives and Mr. and Mrs.—the quiz in which we had excelled, see earlier comment—random kidnappings and attempted assassinations could be disruptive.
Despite all of this, the choosing of this year’s kid-free break wasn’t going according to plan.
“How many times are we going to have to do this?” asked Landen as he pinned the map on the wall and retreated to a safe distance.
“As long as it takes,” I said. “If I’m going on holiday, it won’t be to Wantage.”
Don’t get me wrong, Wantage might be a welcome holiday destination if you live in, say Istanbul, Vancouver or even Basingstoke, where a welcome holiday destination was pretty much “anywhere that wasn’t Basingstoke.” But it wasn’t to us. Wantage was only half an hour away in the car or two stops on the Monorail and we’d been there numerous times. Agreed, the town had a lot going for it: the remains of a royal palace, a thriving cinema of international renown and an intriguing local pastry known as the mufflin. It also had a Shakespeare theme park definitely worth missing and a model village that was astonishing to behold, but really only once. Recently Wantage had undeservedly become the epicentre of the increasingly popular ultra-right-wing Blyton fundamentalist movement known as Neoblytonianism, which had progressed from laughable seven-person sparkler marches to not-so-laughable five-thousand-strong torch-bearing gatherings complete with chanting, nonsensical rambling speeches and a lot of quasi-military posturing. But on the plus side Wantage was a friendly place that possessed one of the finest antiquarian libraries and research centres in Wessex, currently host to a travelling H. G. Wells exhibition that I’d not yet seen. It was also home to a recently opened rent in the earth that looked suspiciously like a gateway to the underworld.
But the problem wasn’t really Wantage, it was this: We’d already thrown three darts at the world map hoping for Majorca or Kerala or Gower but each time the dart had embedded itself in Wantage—which was both annoying and statistically speaking about as likely as having breakfast with the now very dead Lola Vavoom.
I closed my eyes and threw the dart. Landen moved closer to have a look.
“Hmm,” he said, “Wantage again. It’s even in the same hole.”
“What’s going on?” asked Tuesday, who had just walked into the kitchen. Her laboratories were in the east wing of the house and she was not averse to figuring out the answer to two or three issues that had been confounding humankind before breakfast. She was now sixteen and I thought looked a lot like Landen, although Landen said I was wrong and she looked a lot like me. She was petite, cut her hair short so it didn’t get caught in lab machinery and wore mostly clothes of an utterly practical nature, a habit with which I could find no fault.
We had wanted her to stay in school to learn to be human so she didn’t turn out some sort of weird, barely intelligible mad inventor type of person, but there was no school, college or, indeed, any advanced training facility that could improve upon her mind, which was as keen as it was creative. We had conceded recently that Tuesday’s finding a cure for hydrogronculitis was probably more valuable to humanity than being an average wing defence in netball and dealing with physics teacher Mrs. Hopkins, who, Tuesday said, seemed to have it in for her. So we agreed she could leave school.
“We’re having holiday destination issues, Sweetpea,” I replied. “Trouble choosing somewhere that isn’t Wantage.”
“The New Jersey Wantage?”
“Sadly not—the one just down the road. I’ve thrown the dart four times and each time it’s the same.”
“Hmm,” said Tuesday, looking at the map, “sounds to me like you subconsciously want to go there. You’re an exceptionally fine shot, after all. Perhaps you have a secret hankering for the Lester Piggott Tax Avoidance Museum, upcoming Lola Vavoom film retrospective or the annual Chimera Festival.”[4]
“And the fiery ‘Gateway to the Underworld,’” added Landen, who was always eager to visit new tourist attractions, no matter how banal or surreal. “It’s apparently quite interesting now they have the visitor’s interpretation centre and gift shop—although I understand the smell of sulphur can be quite heavy if the wind is in the wrong direction.”
The Gateway was Wantage’s newest attraction and a major boost for Shakesmania, Wantage’s definitely-past-its-best Shakespeare theme park, upon whose land the Gateway had opened up. Groundbreaking when it first opened in 1928, Shakesmania now ranked number eighty-six out of the eighty-seven Shakespeare-related theme parks in the nation, pipped to awfulness only by Bardworld on Seaford Pier. Shakesmania was seared into every local child’s memories from an early age, and not for the right reasons: If the fruity breath of the eternally drunk Falstaff park wardens didn’t disturb you enough, then the rollercoaster that Health and Safety forgot would certainly leave you in a cold sweat: A derailment in 1976 left seven passengers badly injured and one missing. It was supposed she ended up as a permanent exhibit in the “Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark scare ride,” among the drowned Ophelias that were otherwise clearly shop mannequins floating in water-filled skips.
“Why not try a spinning globe with your dart?” suggested Gavin Watkins, who had just stepped in. He was Tuesday’s boyfriend, also sixteen, had lank greasy hair and was hideously obnoxious, even by the low bar already set by many teenage boys. If it weren’t for the fact that he was a mathematician of some considerable talent and that Tuesday seemed to be quite illogically fond of him, I would ban him from the house. Landen had a theory that Gavin had sought, found, then bathed in the Fountain of Inexplicable Teenage Attractiveness.
“Not even you,” continued Gavin, “could hit such a tiny target on a spinning globe.”
“A globe’s a very good idea, Googly Bear,” said Tuesday and ran off to fetch one, leaving the rest of us in an uncomfortable silence. __
Footnotes [1] The COuncil of Registered Gas Installers
[2] A spaniel does not need to be homesick to follow you around. Any spaniel owner will confirm this.
[3] The Gravitube is a network of vertical tunnels through the earth. Run in a vacuum to remove resistance, the carriages move by gravity alone. The system works regardless of where the tunnel begins and ends—the trip from Swindon to Singapore took the same amount of time as Swindon to Brighton, a little over forty minutes. The “Deep Drops” are always exhilarating and even allow for some zero-gravity fun when the carriage passes through the core.
[4] The World’s first and still most popular venue for hobby genetic engineers to show off their creations.
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