William Shakespeare wrote that death was "the undiscovered
country from whose bourn no traveller returns." He was wrong about
the country. Three Australian students are about to prove it.
In a manor house in Queensland, a University of Queensland physicist
has spent years solving the one problem that makes every other problem
look small. He has kept it secret. He has kept it locked. He did not
account for his niece's graduation party.
Three students find the machine. Three students use it. And William
Shakespeare - forty-six years old, the greatest writer in the English
language, and very much in the middle of a dangerous situation in the
year 1610 - is pulled four hundred years into the future before anyone
can stop it.
Now he is in Brisbane. And Brisbane is not ready for him.
And the students who brought him here are discovering that
Shakespeare is not a passive guest. He is observant, brilliant,
and paying very close attention to everything.
So are others.
It has not taken long for certain powerful and morally flexible
people to realise what the Bard of Avon is worth - not as a writer,
but as a commodity. As a brand. As a property. The students did not
plan a rescue. They are going to have to execute one.
And when Shakespeare finally goes home to 1610 - to his pen, his
paper, and the plays he has not yet written - the question hanging
over everything is the one historians have argued about for four
hundred years:
Where did the ideas in his final masterworks come from?
The Undiscovered Country is a time-travel adventure with
the wit of Back to the Future, the literary mischief of
Blackadder, and the irresistible central question of what the
world's greatest mind would make of the world we've built since
he left it.
To read or not to read? Scroll up. That is the answer.
Related Subjects
Language Arts