Hollywood visionary Joe Seabright seems to have it all: fame, wealth, his own city . . . Hell, he's even pals with the president. It's all thanks to The Solix Chronicles: Joe's world-conquering, box office-pulverising science-fiction saga.

But despite everything, Joe is haunted by failure. For what he wants more than anything is to win a 'Best Picture' Oscar. And he doesn't have one. Worse still, he only has one more movie to make before his sci-fi saga is complete: one last chance to achieve his lifelong dream.

Joe's problem is simple: his writing stinks. The dialogue in his movies is as wooden as the empty shelf in his office, specially reserved for his long-awaited golden statuette. If he's ever going to win an Oscar, he desperately needs someone to polish his butt-clenchingly bad screenplays - and, Joe being Joe, there's only one man up to the job: William Shakespeare.

So it is, thanks to a miraculous feat of genetic enhancement, Joe inspires himself with the genius of the great Bard of Avon. Feeling the Oscar within his clasp at last, he sits down at his computer and prepares to write the greatest screenplay ever created.

Meanwhile, in London, England, Shakespeare authorship boffin Wendy Preston leads her jolly band of sceptics in their annual conference. Fuelled by wine and cheese, Wendy and her cohorts resume hostilities over the question of who really wrote those wonderful plays, little guessing that their lives are about to be turned upside down by a megalomaniacal interloper from across the pond . . .

A genre-bending Bard-buster

Tom Brown's two teenage obsessions were Shakespeare and Star Wars. To this day he remains uncertain whether Hamlet or The Empire Strikes Back is mankind's greatest artistic achievement. In the 2000s, he worked at Shakespeare's Globe under the stewardship of famous anti-Stratfordian Mark Rylance, becoming fascinated by the passion associated with discussion of 'Shakespeare's' true identity. At the same time, the Star Wars prequels were in cinemas, cheerfully wrecking a whole childhood's happy memories. One happy day, the two obsessions fused.

The result is a frenetic and often hilarious transatlantic adventure, full of big questions and big egos. Along the way we meet a brilliant, beautiful geneticist, a spooky collector of great artists' DNA, and an embattled mathematician, flailing for a numerical grasp of human artistry.

Joyfully melding the worlds of Shakespeare, science-fiction and space opera, So Long, Shakespeare is an exuberant and warm-hearted exploration of everything that makes us care about great art, and the geniuses who create it.

From the book

'Joe shivered. Even though all he was looking at was plain plastic containing an anonymous liquid, there was something ghostly about the overtones. Here was Shakespeare: not literally, but equally not something inanimate like a skull or a hair. This was altogether more spiritual, more profound: Shakespeare's essence, the genetic coding that had programmed the greatest writer who ever lived.'