Early Riser

Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “hilarious” (The Guardian), “blindingly inventive,” (The Seattle Times) and “wonderfully weird dystopian thriller” (Shelf Awareness) from the author of The Constant Rabbit and the Thursday Next series “A cause for celebration . . . Fforde writes witty, chewy sentences, full of morsels, and delivers them deadpan. . . . [His] relentless imagination and his affection for his characters are contagious and irresistible.”—The New York Times Book Review Every Winter, the human population hibernates. During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, devoid of human activity. Well, not quite. Your name is Charlie Worthing and it’s your first season with the Winter consuls, the group responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams, which you dismiss as nothing more than an artefact born of the sleeping mind. When the dreams start to kill people, it’s unsettling. When you get the dreams too, it’s weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity. But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping, and stamp collecting; ensure you aren’t eaten by Nightwalkers; and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical Wintervolk. But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you’ll be fine.