This inventive fantasy from bestseller Fforde (The Eyre Affair) imagines a screwball future in which social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception. Centuries after the cryptically cataclysmic Something That Happened, a Colortocracy, founded on the inflexible absolutes of the chromatic scale, rules the world. Amiable Eddie Russett, a young Red, is looking forward to marrying a notch up on the palette and settling down to a complacent bourgeois life. But after meeting Jane G-23, a rebellious working-class Grey, and a discredited, invisible historian known as the Apocryphal man, Eddie finds himself questioning the hitherto sacred foundations of the status quo. En route to finding out what turned things topsy-turvy, Eddie navigates a vividly imagined landscape whose every facet is steeped in the author's remarkably detailed color scheme. Sometimes, though, it's hard to see the story for the chromotechnics.

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, liebe ApoloniaX!

I wish you a colourful reading ;)

Thank you so much, Releanna, looking forward to reading it.
(I almost bought this book a few days ago....)

A great read - brilliant concept, eccentric, satiric, entertaining. A terrible, controlling, Orwellian society with rigid social hierarchies - and lots of good laughs (Great Leap Backward, overemployment, spoons a rare comodity, apocryphal people, loopholery ...) I never thought dystopian fiction can be that hilarious. It builds up slowly, the reader has to find out how this weird world works, but then... no spoiler here.
It's a long wait now: Shades of Grey 2 / Painting by Numbers will be out in ???...

Wishlist surprise
There is still space in the package....

Yay! A wishlist book. I added this to my wishlist after reading a review in Sci-fi now. This book came with lots of goodies :) Thanks!

I didn't like this as much as I thought I would. I found most of it quiet dull with the odd laugh thrown in. I didn't really start to get into it, until they ventured to High Saffron. Now I'm slightly annoyed because I want to find out what happens but not if I have to read another slow burner. I liked the ideas in the book. I just think they could have been written in a more interesting way.

Granting wishes and keeping them moving :)

Thanks for this wonderful surprise book. Looking forward to having a read of it.

My wife received this book as a random act of bookcrossing kindness - I am so pleased! Because I wanted a book to read and she passed this to me first, as she was finishing another book.

I have read other FForde books and enjoyed them, but with this book (first in trilogy), I very much enjoyed the allegorical storyline of this tale. Its a great read, very well balanced in all areas, teasing the story out without slowing the pace too much. Felt like I read the book in one sitting; Jjust Bbrilliant.