Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life

It tells the story of Shakespeare's life with a mixture of fact and fiction, the latter including an affair with a black prostitute named Fatimah, who inspires the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

The title refers to the first line of Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", in which Shakespeare describes his love for a dark-haired woman.

Burgess recounted in his Foreword added to later editions that the novel was a project of his for many years, but the process of writing accelerated so that publishing would coincide with the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, on 23 April 1964.

[1]: 1–2 As Burgess reminds readers in his foreword, the novel has a frame story in which a professor of a Malaysian college named "Mr. Burgess" is delivering his final lecture on the life of Shakespeare before returning to the United Kingdom, while progressively becoming more drunk on rice wine and gradually less inhibited as the lecture progresses.

It also includes a plot of Shakespeare becoming cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who had stayed in Stratford, a thesis Burgess first encountered in literature in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of James Joyce's Ulysses.