Rewind: Letters to the Past

Lambert is in prison and has stopped expecting anything to change. His girlfriend betrayed him and framed him, and that is how he ended up there. Then a time mailbox comes into his hands. A letter posted in it is delivered to someone in the past. He tries it on himself first. He writes to the Lambert of the day before with the winning lottery numbers and wakes up the next morning having won a prize worth a million. After that he writes to Cao Xueqin, and to Einstein, and to others like them, and from these letters he comes away with the complete original text of Dream of the Red Chamber and solutions to some of the hardest problems in mathematics. He uses what he has to get through one crisis after another. The letters also change things he did not set out to change. Human history shifts as a result, and his country comes out stronger and its people more sure of themselves. Then one day a letter comes to him from the future, carrying a warning.