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| Dark Reading Matter UK edition |
Dark Reading Matter USA Edition. |
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2026: She's back. The eighth in the Thursday Next series
USA and Canada: October 6th 2026 (Soho Press) UK, Oz and NZ: October 15th 2026 (Hodder) Likely tour dates are between 5th to 10th Oct for the USA and likely five cities on the East coast. UK tour is likely from the 14th to 22nd Oct, venues TBA. For all updates over tour dates and venues, please go to my Appearances Page
Swindon-based Literary Detective Thursday Next is embarking on her eighth and final adventure: Dark
Reading Matter and she is well aware of the fact. The problem is, others are too. Old foes and new
are plotting a terrible revenge: To disrupt the narrative and make 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 and guide the series to a satisfactory
conclusion. It won't be easy. The Martians have broken out of their HG 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 unrealised literary ideas end up. A Gateway to Hell has opened up at Wantage's Shakesmania, the nation's second to worst Shakespeare theme park and the cosy world of Enid Blyton has been hi-jacked 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 satisfactory conclusion. It's a tall order, but Thursday has a secret weapon: Her own adaptability, her husband Landen, a host of stalwart friends and ultimately the most loyal compatriots she can call upon: Her readers. This is how it opens: |
"..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 death watch beetle. 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 which were just plain vexing: A gas central heating system of such diabolical complexity that only a devil-worshipper with Corgi accreditation would 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 separated only by a comma within the scriptures would not have to suffer a crisis of theological disharmony..." |
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Updated: 17th April 2026 |