Fforde's published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective
Thursday Next:
The Eyre Affair,
Lost in a Good Book,
The Well of Lost Plots,
Something Rotten,
First Among Sequels,
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and
The Woman Who Died a Lot.
The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication. Fforde won the
Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for
The Well of Lost Plots. Several streets in the Thames Reach housing development in Swindon have been named after characters in the series.
The Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the
Next novels, reworks his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was
Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? It was later entitled
Nursery Crime, which now refers to the series of books. These describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to
The Big Over Easy,
The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Shades of Grey, the first novel in a new series, was published December 2009 in the United States and January 2010 in the United Kingdom. The sequel
Red Side Story was published in February 2024 in the United Kingdom and May the same year in the United States. In November 2010 Fforde produced
The Last Dragonslayer, the first novel in a new series. It is a young-adult fantasy novel about a teenage orphan Jennifer Strange which has been adapted for television. Two more books have been published in the series,
The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011) and
The Eye of Zoltar (2014). The series was originally planned as a trilogy, but a fourth book in the series was announced in 2014,
The Great Troll War (2021). ==Short stories==