Tom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 soon after the premiere of his runaway success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is a dazzling fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach, his Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket, a couple of cowboys, a lion who's banned from the Ritz, an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ, and three irresistible women.