The Goliath Corp., formerly an oppressive conglomerate and now an oppressive organized religion, vows to right the wrong they did by eradicating Thursday's husband, and returning to Swindon with her son and a dithering Hamlet in tow, Thursday is confronted with a myriad challenges, not the least of which is finding a Shakespeare clone and reliable child care.

Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection in a time-altered Great Britain in which messing with the classics is a punishable offense, sets out to find out who drowned her husband of a month thirty-eight years ago while interacting with classic literature.

All-out Genre war is rumbling, and the BookWorld desperately needs a heroine like Thursday Next. But with the real Thursday apparently retired to the Realworld, the Council of Genres turns to the written Thursday. The Council wants her to pretend to be the real Thursday and travel as a peacekeeping emissary to the warring factions. A trip up the mighty Metaphoric River beckons-a trip that will reveal a fiendish plot that threatens the very fabric...