One of Britain's most idiosyncratic writers — also an acclaimed poet — returns with a typically original and erotically charged novel. Some time in the not-too-distant future London has merged with Tokyo, police use flying cars to catch kamikazee Boeings and Michael Jackson shops incessantly. Amid the chaos two men are called into a hypnotherapy clinic named the Grid to get treatment for AIDS. They discover that they are the reincarnations of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, a revelation that leads them to the truth about one of the great literary mysteries of all time, the murder of Kit Marlowe in a Deptford tavern in 1593.