"Extraordinarylike a dazzling magic act!"Entertainment Weekly

"A taut, twisting, prize-winning story of two magicians and their fierce fin-de-sicle rivalry that
taints successive generations of their respective families....An unexpectedly compelling fusion
of weird science and legerdemain."Kirkus Reviews

"A brilliant conjuring act by one of the master illusionists of our time."Wired

Winner of the World Fantasy Award

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent sance.
From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and
expose each other. In the course of pursuing each other's ruin, they will deploy all the deception
their magician's craft can command. Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but
with terrible consequences. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations to descendants
who must, for their sanity's sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

Christopher Priest has published ten novels, three short story collections and a number of other books, including critical work, biographies, novelizations and children's non-fiction. He has won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2001 was awarded the Prix Utopia for lifetime achievement in fantastic literature. He is married to the writer Leigh Kennedy. They live in Hastings, England, with their two children.

Simon Vance, winner of Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2006, was born in England and worked for the BBC as a radio news announcer and as a narrator for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Besides narrating, he is involved in numerous stage-acting projects in the United States and Europe.