Christopher Priest (1943-2024) was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and began writing full-time in 1968. He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.
He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office and received two Academy Award nominations. Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming.
He served as Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.
As a journalist he wrote features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many other prestigious publications.
The Prestige
Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later.
Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other’s shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity.
At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.
Airside
Hollywood actress Jeanette Marchand was beautiful, talented, beloved by audiences. During a time of personal crisis, she declares she is going to take a vacation in England, to explore the possibilities of working in London, before returning to the USA.
She never returned to the USA. She never even left the airport. At least – no-one saw her leave.
Years later, a young film student finds himself digging deeper into her disappearance. Where did she go? Was she really dead? Who was the mysterious man who sat beside her on the flight across from New York?
This is a gripping speculative historical novel, grounded in the golden age of film. Perfect for fans of true crime, conspiracy theories, and SF that is chillingly close to reality.
The Inverted World
A uniquely powerful novel of a society in decay. On a planet whose very nature is a mystery a massive decrepit city is pulled along a massive railway track, laying the line down before it as it progresses into the wilderness.
The society within toils under an oppressive regime, its structures always on the point of collapse, the lives of its individuals lived in misery. No one knows where they are going, why they are going or what they will find when they get there.
The ending of the novel provides one of the most profound twists in SF.
The Glamour
Richard Grey wakes up in a hospital with amnesia after a terrorist bombing. His memories gradually start to return, but what he remembers doesn’t always seem to coincide with what really happened. And then there is Susan Kewley, an enigmatic young woman whom Richard does not remember but who claims to have been his lover. With her help, Richard will discover the strange and terrible world of the glamour and a remarkable power both of them may possess …
From the master of mind-bending literary fiction, Christopher Priest The Glamour is both a gripping, page-turning novel of suspense and an intricate puzzle, whose construction is so clever that readers will want to read the novel a second time to see how exactly it was done.
The Separation
The Separation is the story of twin brothers, rowers in the 1936 Olympics. One joins the RAF – shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg, he becomes Churchill’s aide-de-camp, while his twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross to rescue victims of the Blitz in London.
But this is not a straightforward story of the Second World War: this is an alternate history. The two brothers – both called J.L. Sawyer – live their lives in alternate versions of reality. In one, the Second World War ends as we imagine it did; in the other, the war ends in 1941.
The Separation is an emotionally riveting story of how the small man can make a difference; it’s a savage critique of Winston Churchill, the man credited as the saviour of Britain and the Western World, and it’s a story of how one perceives and shapes the past.