Early Riser

It is good to see Jasper Fforde back after a break. This quirky dystopia is full of his trademark silliness and invention, and on a sentence and paragraph level it sparkles with wit and sharp ideas. Unfortunately it doesn't hold together so well as a sustained novel. The plot is somewhat sketchy, and Fforde tries to obfuscate this by having it swing and reverse and change directions every fifty pages or so, but it just ends up as a bit of a confusing and insubstantial mess. The pleasure of spending time in his world just about outweighs this, but I wouldn't recommend this as the first Fforde you should read.