'You said sex twice.'

'Yes,' said Connie, blinking twice, 'I know.'

Rabbits aged better than humans so long as they got a chance to age at all, and she was pretty much unchanged in the thirty-odd years since I'd seen her last: smaller and slimmer than the norm, but Wildstock, the generic brown-furred variety. She wore a short spotted summer dress under a pale blue buttoned cardigan and her ears, long and elegant, carried four small silver ear-studs halfway up her right and three near the base of her left. Her most striking feature, then as now, was her eyes: both large and expressive, but while one was the brown of a fresh hazelnut, the other was pale bluey-violet, the colour of harebells.

'Are you OK?' she said, as I think I might have been staring.

Luckily, Neville Chamberlain chose that moment to interrupt.

'Rabbit and Rabbitability would be under six-three-two point six-six,' she said, referring to the Dewey categorisation number that related to: 'Technology/Agriculture/Pests/Disposal'. It was a predictably insulting response. She was, after all, married to Victor Mallett and the entire Mallett family's antagonism towards any social or species group not their own was well known. It was said Mallett children were encouraged to feed the ducks solely 'to see them fight'.

'Actually, Mr Chamberlain,' put in Stanley Baldwin, 'it's probably a six-three-six point nine-three.' This was a little less insulting as it referred to 'Technology/Agriculture/Domestic Animals/Rabbits', but was equally of little use. Connie wasn't after books about rabbits, but the range of British classics retold for rabbits, published when funding was more secure after the Spontaneous Anthropomorphic Event, when integration into society was still seen as guiding policy rather than the pipe-dream of idealistic liberals.

'Eight-nine-nine point nine-nine, Mr Major,' added the Sole Librarian, who didn't much care for rabbits either but hated misuse of the Dewey Decimal System a great deal more. 'Literature/Other Languages. Shelf nine.'

'Let me show you,' I said, handing the returned books to Neville, who hurried off to shelve them quickly so she could return, presumably, to air her anti-rabbit sentiments more fully. For my part I led Connie quickly towards the foreign language section.

'Hey,' she said with a giggle, 'isn't naming the team after former prime ministers a direct lift from that Kathryn Bigelow heist-gone-wrong movie?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Sure you do,' she said. 'The one with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. What's its name again?'

'Point Break,' I said, suddenly remembering that I'd seen it first with her at the Student Union cinema. We'd sat in the back row, a place usually reserved for lovers, but we weren't there for that reason. Rabbit cinema-goers, acutely conscious of how their often expressive ear movements can ruin a movie for anyone sitting behind, politely migrated to the back. Our upper arms had touched as we sat, which I remembered I quite liked; it was the sum total of any physical contact.

'And,' I concluded, 'it's more a homage, really.'

Excerpted from The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. Copyright © 2020 by Jasper Fforde. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.