The Constant Rabbit

Contents

About the Author

Also by Jasper Fforde

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Speed Librarying

Toast & TwoLegsGood

Spotters & Spotting

Fudds and Flopsies

Ross & Rabbits

Griswold & Gossip

Pippa & Pasta

Next Sunday, Next Door

Searching in vain & Shopping in town

Senior Group Leader

Dinner & Dandelion Brandy

Labstock Bunshot

Rabbit Riot

Shopping & Sally Lomax

Tittle-Tattle and Toast

All Saints, All Spite

Cops & Kitten

The Thespian Talk-Through

Toby’s Torn T-shirt

Connie & Caution

Morning Mood

MegaWarren

Car & Custody

The Art of the Deal

Bunnytrap Trap

Bouncing with Constance

Bugged Bunny

Dinner & Deity

Cordiality Collapse

Lapin Flambé & HMP Leominster

The Trials of Lance deBlackberry

Rabbit Colony One

Endgame

The Battle of May Hill

Aftermath

Acknowledgements:

Footnotes

About the Author

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another twelve novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing, and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.

Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

Also by Jasper Fforde

The Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

The Nursery Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

Shades of Grey

Early Riser

The Dragonslayer Series

(for young adult readers)

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Eye of Zoltar

THE CONSTANT RABBIT

Jasper Fforde

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2020

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Cover images © shutterstock.com

The quote used in the epigraph here from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (© Bill Bryson 2003), first published in the UK in 2003 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 76362 1

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 76363 8

eBook ISBN 978 1 444 76365 2

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

It cannot be said too often: all life is one.

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

To the human eye, each rabbit looks very much like the other.

The Private Life of the Rabbit – R.M. Lockley

Speed Librarying

Somebody once said that the library is actually the dominant life form on the planet. Humans simply exist as the reproductive means to achieve more libraries.

‘Still on the Westerns, Baroness Thatcher?’ I asked, moving slowly down the line of volunteers who were standing at readiness outside our library, a smallish mock-mock-Tudor building in the middle of Much Hemlock, itself more or less in the middle of the county of Hereford, which in turn was pretty much in the middle of the UK.

Much Hemlock was, in pretty much every meaning of the word, middling.

‘Westerns are the best when they’re not really Westerns at all,’ said Baroness Thatcher, ‘like when more akin to the Greek Epics. True Grit, for example.’

‘Shane is more my kind of thing,’ said Stanley Baldwin, who I think fancied himself as a softly spoken man of understated power and influence. Winston Churchill opined they were both wrong and that The Ox-Bow Incident was far better with its generally positive themes of extrajudicial violence. Neville Chamberlain tried to keep the peace and find some middle ground on the issue while David Lloyd George simply sat there in quiet repose, mentally preparing for the adrenaline-fuelled six minutes of Speed Librarying that lay before us.