Book cover - a red land with a spoon in the foreground.Fourteen years ago, I read Fforde's Shades of Grey and my life hasn't been quite the same since. It was a magical tale, almost totally devoid of exposition, building in an fantasy world like no other. Fans have been clamouring for a sequel ever since.
The first few chapters of the sequel do an excellent job of exposition - but this isn't the sort of book you can pick up without having recently read the original. I got a dozen pages into Red Side Story before I realised that I remembered nothing about the original. So I went back to read Shades of Grey. I'm delighted to say it was just as good as I remember - a delirious ride through a messed up world.
The second book is… more of the same. It slowly reveals more of the backstory and its grim origins. It builds to a rather satisfying conclusion. Along the way it gets a little tied-up in its own rules, and makes some weird pop-culture references. But never fails to be brilliantly perplexing in its structured surrealness.
In one my smarter moments I likened our era to someone arriving late to a concert, just as the final chords were hanging in the air.
If you like Fforde's inventive and bizarre worlds, you'll like this. But, I warn you, it really needs you to have read Shades of Grey first.
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