A THIRD novel portraying Swindon in a unique light is set to hit bookshops worldwide. Jasper Fforde has already had two best-selling hits with his surreal Thursday Next detective novels.

The books are set in an alternative version of 1980s Swindon and feature a host of familiar landmarks and locations.

And the latest novel in the series is no different.

This time literary detective Thursday Next is investigating a mystery which revolves around The Well of Lost Plots.

This fantasy watering hole is the place where all fiction is created.

The book includes a section where Charles Dickens' character Miss Haversham attempts to break the land-speed record on the A419 heading towards Cirencester.

Mr Fforde is currently working on the fourth novel in the Thursday Next series and it promises to place Swindon even more firmly on the literary map

He said: "I wanted to call it a town like Swindon but I don't think marketing will let me do that.

"It will be entirely set in Swindon and should be out next year."

Fforde, 41, who appeared at this year's Festival of Literature in the town, sets his books in a parallel universe where the Crimean war never ended, Wales is a socialist republic and cheese is subject to an 83 per cent tax.

Currently living in North Wales, he chose to fictionalise Swindon after staying in the town while working as a runner on the film Champions the Bob Champion Story in 1982.

The unlikely location has not stopped Mr Fforde's books selling thousands around the world. They are particularly popular in America and New Zealand.

Explaining the town's attraction he said: "I had always wanted to write a story in a place where no-one else had set a story.

"I didn't think many people would write a story that was set in Swin-don that was the appeal.

"In the early 1980s Swindon was a lot worse and that was part of it.

"Now I've come back and Swin-don is no better or worse than many British provincial towns there isn't that shabbiness that first appealed to me.

"I thought I'd take a little town like Swindon where no-one usually goes, because it is a place where absolutely anything can happen."

The Well of Lost Plots is published by Hodder and Stoughton and is available from July 7.

The other Thursday Next novels are The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book.