Nothing Like The Sun is one of Burgess’s most fully realised creative engagements with Shakespeare, an inspiration that continued to the end of his life. Yet the energy and extravagance of the novel are exhilarating and the whole is profound, engrossing, and ultimately hugely rewarding. The language is dense and allusive, and the style – consciously modelled on Joyce’s Ulysses, with streams of consciousness and wordplay – is rich and challenging.

Written in a version of Elizabethan English, it is wildly inventive, full of bawdy humour and references to Shakespeare’s poems, plays and the texture of its historical setting.īurgess described writing the novel as ‘the hardest I had ever undertaken’. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.Othing Like The Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life was published in 1964 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.īeginning with Shakespeare’s early life, the novel follows Will as he grows up both romantically and artistically. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No.

He published studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East the Enderby quartet of novels about a poet and his muse Nothing Like the Sun, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life A Clockwork Orange, an exploration of the nature of evil and Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. Born in Manchester, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England. He was also a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.Īnthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer.

Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess