Three months after the events of The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next is happily married to Landen Parke-Laine and working as a literary detective in Swindon.

One day, Thursday meets her father, a renegade ChronoGuard, who informs her that the world's going to end in a flood of an unknown pink chemical.

Mycroft has destroyed his Prose Portal after the events of The Eyre Affair and retired, leaving the invention business in the hands of his two well-meaning but inept sons, Orville and Wilbur.

Thursday is sent with her partner, Bowden Cable, to the mansion of Lord Volescamper, a major supporter of the front-runner in the up-coming election for President.

Tests done at the station determine its authenticity, and it seems to have appeared just in time to help its discoverer, Yorrick Kaine, to win the election (thanks to the "Shakespeare vote").

Thursday had marooned Jack Schitt in Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven at the end of The Eyre Affair, and his employer, The Goliath Corporation, a Big Brother-like agency which is the de facto ruler of England, wants him back.

After a preliminary hearing in the Byzantine world of Kafka's The Trial and saving Abel Magwitch from drowning before the beginning of Great Expectations, Havisham and Thursday part ways and the latter character enters "The Raven" and retrieves Jack Schitt.

Refusing her father's offer, Thursday travels to a book in the Well of Lost Plots—a subdivision of the Great Library that contains unpublished and unfinished works—in order to take a year's maternity leave with her memory of Landen.