Early Riser: The standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'Fforde pours his brilliant imagination into every corner of this world' Daily Mail

'Fforde keeps the puns and neologisms coming thick and fast while exploring every facet of his novel's intriguing premise' Financial Times

Every Winter, the human population hibernates.

During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, and devoid of human activity.

Well, not quite.

Your name is Charlie Worthing and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses.

You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artefact borne of the sleeping mind.

When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling.

When you get the dreams too, it's weird.

When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren't eaten by Nightwalkers whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk.

But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you'll be fine.

Praise for Jasper Fforde:

'Forget all the rules of time, space and reality; just sit back and enjoy the adventure' Telegraph

'True literary comic genius' Sunday Express

'Ingenious' Terry Pratchett

Reviews

No summaries can do justice to [Fforde's] sheer inventiveness, wit, complexity, erudition, unexpectedness and originality - The Times

Reading a Fforde novel feels like taking off on a magic carpet, only to be picked up by another and another and taken on new flights of fantasy . . . When the plot is thundering along, peppered with jokes, lively dialogue and silly names . . . you just sit back and enjoy the ride. - Scotsman

Fans of the late Douglas Adams, or, even, Monty Python, will feel at home with Fforde - Herald

True literary comic genius - Sunday Express

Douglas Adams would be proud - Scotsman

Ingenious

Forget all the rules of time, space and reality; just sit back and enjoy the adventure. - Telegraph

'Fforde's books are more than just an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and are tautly plotted. They have empathetic heroes and heroines who nearly make terrible mistakes and suitably dastardly villains who do. They also have more twists and turns than Christie, and are embellished with the rich details of Dickens or Pratchett - Independent

Author Bio

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another fifteen novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing, and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.

Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

Visit Jasper's website, www.jasperfforde.com, find him on Facebook, www.facebook.com/jasperffordebooks, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/jasperfforde.