The main business here is the building of an outlandishly original fantasy world, artfully revealed to us in provocative flashes by a young apprentice named Helward. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.Īs a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.Inverted World is the first book by Priest I've read, and I found it to be a revelation.

Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming. It received two Academy Award nominations. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). 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 began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. But the world he's about to discover is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.Ĭhristopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. The rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they're carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. The only alternative to progress is death. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the optimum and into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes.

The inverted world christopher priest