Jasper Fforde

The bestselling writer takes us to a world where people hibernate...

- Jonathan Wright

Different writers have different ways of approaching their books, but for Jasper Fforde the idea of a “narrative dare” is key. What if you were, for example, to set a thriller “in a world in which humans have always hibernated”? Fforde’s answer to this question is contained within Early Riser, a thriller set in the dead of a winter through which most of the population is slumbering.

“It’s like writing a book in a reverse order where the world happens, the detail of the world happens, the dramatic possibilities of the detail in that world happen, and the plot gets tacked on the back of that,” Fforde says.

If that sounds like an arse-about-tit way of doing things, Fforde probably wouldn’t entirely disagree, but in the case of Early Riser, it works a treat as we see winter in a chilly world where, far from people being worried about global warming, they’re concerned about relentlessly advancing glaciers. As the population sleeps, the officers of the Winter Consul watch over them. It’s an inherently spooky idea that draws in part on Fforde’s own time as a focus puller in the film industry working on after-hours shoots when it was, as he remembers it, dark, chilly and the world seemed to operate under different rules.

“There’s a sort of survival instinct that happens when people do night work,” says Fforde. “You talk to emergency services who do night work and [they say] it’s very different, it’s not just a shift, there’s something very different about being around when everybody else is fast asleep.”