Dark Reading Matter: An Evening with Jasper Fforde - Cardiff

Join us in welcoming to Waterstones Cardiff the one and only Jasper Fforde to talk about his new book Dark Reading Matter, the final instalment in his beloved Thursday Next series.
The eighth and final, gloriously imaginative instalment in Jasper Fforde's bestselling Thursday Next series, Dark Reading Matter finds our renowned Special Operative in literary detection once more battling with a familiar foe as the Goliath Corporation seeks to use the 'Dark Bookverse' of deleted novels and slush-pile manuscripts for profit.
The Dark Reading Matter is a theoretical realm that suggests that the observable bookverse can only account for 20% of the calculated total readable mass. Out there somewhere, possibly, is a larger and more expansive and unseeable 'Dark Bookverse' that contains millions of deleted novels, slush-pile manuscripts, lost poems, forgotten pop culture references, long unheard oral tradition, stories and ideas that were still in people's minds when they died.It seems The Goliath Corporation hope to exploit the Dark Reading Matter for profit, and Thursday Next is once again pitted against a familiar foe. As is so often with Thursday's World, a visitor named Roger Thatt who purports to be from Fourth Wall Publishing has some peculiar ideas of his own that require careful thought. Is Thursday and everyone she knows living in a simulation? Was her world created from scratch Last Thursday as Roger supposes, and are the books she reads the only direction in which books can be read?With existential questions the least of her troubles and a family to take care of, Thursday must defeat the Goliath Corporation, ensure that a tear in the fabric of the Bookworld does not suck all literature from hers, assist Roger Thatt to dealing with the issues in his own reality, and conclude her own series so she can enjoy a comfortable retirement, while dodging the threat of the worse fate imaginable for a story: The Scooby Doo ending.

Jasper Fforde is a bestselling British novelist and the author of Thursday Next series. Before his writing career, London-born Fforde worked as a focus puller in the film industry. His first novel The Eyre Affair was published in 2001, starring the literary detective Thursday Next. It was followed by a further six in the series, including The Well of Lost Plots, which won Fforde the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing in 2004. His other series include Nursery Crime Division and the young adult fantasy series Chronicles of Kazam.Brimming with boundless imagination, linguistic dexterity and exuberant humour, Fforde’s fiction plays with traditional genre conventions, joyfully blending elements of comic fantasy, satire and metafiction.

Refreshments will be provided! Please note that our events space is on the first floor, accessible via stairs or lift. Do contact us if you have any access questions.Doors open at 18:30. Latecomers will be admitted until 19:15.