Although Christopher Priest began his career as a science-fiction writer—and is still well known among readers of British science fiction—his dissatisfaction with the generic constraints of the form has propelled him into more-complex areas of the literary fantastic. His third novel, Inverted World (1974), won the British Science Fiction Association Award and established his reputation in France, where it achieved best-seller status. By 1983 he had attracted the attention of a wider critical circle and had been named one of the best of young British writers by Granta magazine. Later novels also won literary prizes: the German translation of The Glamour (1984) won the Kurd Lasswitz award for best novel in 1988, and The Prestige (1995) received the James Tait Black Memorial Award. Priest's interest in the reliability of memory and narrative, present throughout most of his fiction but increasingly emphasized after A Dream of Wessex (1977), has made his later work...