Southwold Literary Festival ~ Jasper Fforde: Wildly inventive, genre-bending novels

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Time Bestseller list with 'The Eyre Affair' in 2001. His 18th novel, 'Dark Reading Matter', will be published in the UK/USA in 2026.
Fforde's writing is an eclectic mix of genres, which might be described as a joyful blend of Comedy-SF-thriller-Crime-Satire. He freely admits that he is fascinated not just by books themselves, but by the way we read and what we read, and his reinvigoration of tired genres have won him many enthusiastic supporters across the world.

Amongst Fforde's output are police procedurals featuring nursery rhyme characters; a four-book series for Young Adults about Magic and Dragons set in a shabby world of failing magical powers, 'Shades of Grey' (2011) a post-apocalyptic dystopia where social hierarchy is based on the colours you can see, 'Early Riser' (2018), a thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated, and 'The Constant Rabbit' (2020), an allegory about racism and xenophobia in the UK.

“Red Side Story” is a sequel to 2011’s “Shades of Grey”, set in a world where your position in society depended on what bit of the colour spectrum you could see. Eddie Russett (a Red) and Jane Grey (a lowly Grey) have been framed for murder and as they fight to survive, they uncover hidden truths about their society, challenge its rigid rules, and stumble toward the mystery of what really happened to the world centuries ago. Blending satire, romance, and dystopian adventure, it’s equal parts absurdly funny and sharply thought-provoking.

Unreserved seating.