The prestige

The Prestige is a 1995 novel by British writer Christopher Priest. It tells the story of a prolonged feud between two stage magicians in late 1800s England. It is epistolary in structure; that is, it purports to be a collection of real diaries that were kept by the protagonists and later collated. The title derives from the novel's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts: the setup, the performance, and the prestige (effect).The novel received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.