Jasper Fforde
New York: Penguin, 2001
In a world without chronological bounds where Time Police regularly investigate misalignments in history, an officer looking into the question of Shakespearean authorship discovers that the plays do not exist in 1610. He corrects the problem by travelling to 1592 and handing William Shakespeare a copy of the First Folio of 1623, asking him to produce and claim authorship of the plays according to a schedule he provides him. “Shakespeare was only an actor with a potentially embarrassing sideline as a purveyor of bagged commodities in Stratford.”