Startlingly poetic - excellent' - The Spectator 'This fictional autobiography does more than eulogize - Burgess is the only other novelist to pass this test' - Times Literary Supplement 'A brilliantly witty and imaginative piece of writing.' - Classic FM William Shakespeare is dying, with his lawyer at his bedside. It is time to dictate his will. But how can a man put his affairs in order before he's come to terms with his past? Acclaimed poet, novelist, and Shakespeare professor Christopher Rush has put thirty years of scholarship and creativity into this unforgettable re-imagining of the Bard's life. Rush takes readers into the mind of William Shakespeare, a man whose almost superhuman art was forged from very human frailties and misfortunes. Will takes us back to Shakespeare's childhood, his first encounters with sex, and the dangers of politics, plague, and love. We hear the chilling account of the Tyburn executions, see him crossing the frozen Thames with the wooden beams...

In childhood there is no distinction between boy, bird, mammal, or fish. A Twelvemonth and a Day is about change and growth, the fluctuating patterns in the worklife of a fishing and farming community throughout the cycle of a year, and about the year itself, the life of nature. It tells of how that symbolic year-and-a-day can be destroyed by forces we cannot seem to control—ignorance and greed, profit and loss, the wider forces of politics that damage communities and individuals. It is both a lament for a past time and a celebration of its vanished values."With its Bible-sized characters, its feeling for workaday rhythms and the cycle of seasons, its tall and grisly tales of storms and wrecks, whales and sharks, witches and fetches, drowning and exhumations, it does convey a sense of that fatalistic awe which the sea inspired in those deeply devout fishing communities." —Times Literary Supplement"A magical memory of childhood ... powerful, vivid,...

'The scent of God...the air was impregnated with him and his mint-sweet and moth-ball evangelists. Just as it was with herring, as you might expect in a fossilised fishing-village on Scotland's repressed east coast where fishing was an act of faith and not yet a computer-science industry designed to suck the last drops of life out of the sea.' A vivid and moving account of the author's upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s in the little fishing village of St Monans. Rush returns decades later to rediscover his childhood, and offers a frank account of how it was for him. This evocation of a way of life now vanished demonstrates the power of the word to bring the past timelessly to life. Rush writes of family, village characters, church and school; of folklore and fishing, the eternal power of the sea and the cycles of the seasons. With a poet's eye he navigates the worlds of the imagination and the unknown, the archetypal problems of fathers and sons and mother love, and the...