The Grid

Christopher Marlowe and his Elizabethan set are reincarnated in a near-future dystopian London on the brink of destruction, battling AIDS and trapped by their shared past.   A typically original and erotically charged novel by one of Britain's most idiosyncratic writers, The Grid is set in the not-too-distant future, when Britain is ruled by the autocratic Commissar, London has merged with Tokyo and police use flying cars to combat rogue Boeing pilots doing kamikaze stunts over the capital's skyscrapers. Amid the dystopian chaos a group of men attend a mysterious hypnotherapy clinic called the Grid to receive treatment for AIDS—but as the therapy progresses they begin to realize that they are, in fact, reincarnations of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and other members of the dramatists' Elizabethan circle, including Nicholas Skeres, Henry Wriothesley, and Thomas Walsingham. As the past merges with the present they find themselves embarking on a journey that leads to the resolution of one of the all-time great literary mysteries—the murder of Marlowe in a Deptford tavern in 1593—as well as one the most extraordinary finales in recent British fiction.