When Jasper Fforde set his best-selling Thursday Next series in the borough of Swindon, England, little did he know that it would put both the sleepy town and his characters on the map. The books, which blend sci-fi with literary fiction, place Swindon at the centre of a vast government conspiracy in a surreal and futuristic alternate universe. The local council saw the joke. And, perhaps sensing a golden opportunity to shake their public image as the home of a Honda manufacturing plant, appointed Fforde as temporary mayor and named five new streets after his characters. It worked a treat. Swindon is now also known as home of Fforde Fiestas, well-attended conventions organised by Fforde's most ardent readers. Self-described 'ffans' of the famously punny novelist descend on the city for weekends of re-enactments, fancy dress banquets and guided tours. It speaks to the fact that cult novelists have pulling power of which literary giants can only dream, but Fforde seems a touch bemused by the devotion. 'Often I'll pit myself against attendees in trivia contests about my books. I always lose,' he says, before adding with faint sheepishness, 'The questions can be incredibly obscure ... There's a lot going on in my books, y'know.' No one can doubt that. The depth of Fforde's fandom owes much to his ability to construct intricately detailed and absurd alternate realities that counterpoint our own. His Thursday Next books are set in a Britain where the Crimean war still rages, time travel is possible and people can step in and out of literature. Thursday, the main character, is a middle-aged mother and literary detective assigned the task of policing the border between works of literature and the real world, across which enterprising villains frequently try to drag popular characters and hold them to ransom. Twists and clever literary allusions come thick and fast, and the books incorporate characters from classic literature such as Jane Eyre, Hamlet and Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Fforde's Nursery Crime series makes similar use of spin-offs but this time draws them from children's literature. Whimsical police procedurals, they centre on Jack Spratt, a detective who investigates crimes involving nursery rhyme characters, such as the actual circumstances behind the death of Humpty Dumpty and a homicidal Gingerbread Man. Swindon will be bracing for another fiesta soon with the release of Shades of Grey, Fforde's eighth novel. In many ways, the story is a departure for Fforde: more serious than his previous work and his first to feature a cast exclusively made up of original standalone characters. Shades of Grey takes place several centuries in the future against the backdrop of a strange new social order based on colour. Society has become rigidly stratified and one's identity and position are determined by what kind of colour they can see and how richly it appears. Those who see in regal purple occupy plum government posts, while the colour-blind greys are the untouchable caste. People are only able to see their own colours naturally; objects in other hues appear grey. To make up for it, National Colour, a mysterious and seemingly omnipotent government body, colours the world in synthetic hues drawn from a central grid. The story centres on Eddie Russet, a young Red man who dreams of marrying up the spectrum into the better-hued Oxblood family and one day taking over the family string works. But when he finds himself falling in love with a Grey girl with a retrousse nose but no social standing, his mind is overcome with revolutionary ideas. The conceit is vintage Fforde: zany, original and teeming with complexity. Fforde says it is the 'search for the holy grail of originality' that drives him to seek out such outlandish settings. 'Most stories have been told many, many times. The last frontier for authors is the way that they are told. For me, this means creating a world in which human values are completely distorted and changed, moved around and twisted,' he says. The trade-off for this kind of originality, of course, is readability. And while Fforde acknowledges that the need to explain fully the intricacies of his fictional worlds to readers can be an impost on exposition and dialogue, he prefers to think of his novels as obstacle courses: greater challenges bring out new sides to his characters and give him more satirical vantage points as an author. Besides, he says, 'writing without risk is not writing at all'. It is an easy boast for a best-selling author, but Fforde's credentials on this score are unimpeachable. He started writing while working at a day job as a cameraman on feature films, a role for which he is credited in several Hollywood blockbusters, including GoldenEye and Entrapment. Fforde persisted without recognition for more than 10 years, writing five books and amassing an astounding 76 rejection letters - 'only an average of seven and a half per year', he says - before finally finding a publisher for his breakout novel, The Eyre Affair. He declares that, while often dispiriting, the experience has merely hardened his resolve to write about what he wants. In seeming demonstration of his defiance, Fforde once even wrote a sequel to a novel he couldn't sell. Despite the inherent challenges of his new book, Fforde says he was drawn to the idea of a world run on colour by the potential it held for exploring subjectivity. 'I've always liked colour ever since somebody told me it doesn't exist in the real world. Colour is something that we clothe the external world with. Red is not red; it only exists in our heads,' he says. 'And it's one of the clearest indications of how our perception of the world belongs wholly to us.' Although not as allusive as his previous work, Shades of Grey is clearly a dystopian novel and it nods knowingly in the direction of 1984 and Brave New World. The watchful government promotes the paradoxical slogan 'Apart We Are Together'. Technology has been repealed across several Great Leaps Backward so that Model T Fords are the only cars left. But travel is strictly controlled and the populace is spread thinly across a small network of villages, where order is enforced by despotic prefects chosen for the depth of their colour perception. And, like classic dystopias, Shades of Grey was written with at least one eye on the contemporary. 'I wanted to take the idea of localisation to an extreme,' Fforde says, 'to create a world where no one moves around'. Globalisation may be the phrase of the minute, but growing concern about cutting carbon emissions from travel and backlashes against increased migration has prompted Fforde to imagine a future where it is radically undone. All of which makes me wonder: will we yet see a serious book from the resolutely unserious novelist? 'No, I don't really do serious. I might write one by accident. But I like books I'd want to read. And serious books I find just too ... not real,' says Fforde. 'Why would I want to read a book about some ghastly thing that happened to someone when it's all just made up? That's the job of non-fiction. Fiction should be something larger than life ... like a big, Hollywood musical.' Writer's notes Name: Jasper Fforde Age: 48 Born: London Lives: near Hay-on-Wye, South Wales Family: partner Mari; twin girls, two sons Genres: fantasy, science fiction, comedy Latest book: Shades of Grey Other works include: The Eyre Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002); The Big Over Easy (2005) Other jobs: Cameraman, clapper loader, movie-set assistant Next project: One of Our Thursdays is Missing (Book Six in the Thursday Next series) What the papers say: 'Fforde's books are more than an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and ... embellished with the rich details of a Dickens or Pratchett.' The Independent 'No summaries can do justice to the sheer inventiveness, wit, complexity, erudition, unexpectedness and originality of the works, nor to their vast repertoire of intricate wordplay and puns.' The Times