In the Library
The Man Who Was Thursday
G.K. Chesterton, 1908
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 15
- Length
- Length 57k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Franz Kafka
The Trial does the same thing, but strips away the wit, leaving a man alone before an authority that never explains itself, only judges.
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Alice does the same thing, but its traveller falls into wonder rather than into a conspiracy that turns out to be something kinder than feared.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll and Hyde does the same thing, but the double identity hides inside one man instead of a whole council of masks.
£1.99
About the book
A room in Scotland Yard is so dark that Gabriel Syme cannot see the man recruiting him, only hear a voice telling him he is now a policeman sworn to fight anarchists who do not know he exists. His first assignment sends him to a secret council of six anarchists named for the days of the week, presided over by a seventh calling himself Sunday, and he talks his way into becoming Thursday. What he does not expect, through chase after chase that crosses the Channel and back again, is that every other day at that table is wearing the same disguise he is. When the detectives finally close in, Sunday does not go quietly: he flees on the back of an elephant, then straight up in a hot air balloon, laughing, and leads them to his own front door. There, at a costume ball where six men dress as the six days of creation, the farce turns suddenly serious and asks the oldest question there is: whether whoever made this nightmare can be trusted to wake you from it.