Christopher Priest Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Christopher Priest is a science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction novelist. The author was born in Cheadle in Manchester, and began writing soon after he graduated from school. He started out writing short stories and other literary works that were featured in magazines and other outlets during the 1960s.

He continued to write in this format, even as she also wrote occasional non fiction work and novels that include children’s fiction biographies and critical work. He published “Indoctrinaire,” his debut novel in 1970, which began a stretch of more than twenty years in which he published a book every two years.

He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for “Fugue for a Darkening Island,” in 1972. He also won the British Science Fiction Association’s BSFA Award. During the 1970s, he got a job at Foundations, a semi academic journal in the UK, where he was an associate editor.

This offered a platform to popularize and criticize science fiction when the genre still did not have the influence it would later come to have. During the 1980s, he started writing under the pseudonym Colin Wedgelock and John Luther Novak, writing the novels “Short Circuit” and “Mona Lisa” respectively.

Priest’s biggest breakthrough was when he published “The Prestige,” an epistolary work that came out in 1995. This work was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA awards, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the World Fantasy Award.

The novel would also be made into a Christopher Nolan directed film that received critical acclaim when it was released in 2006. Priest has also written drama for television and radio and has made contributions in reviews and features in many newspapers and magazines.

Some of these include the “New Statesman,” the “Independent,” and “The Times.” He is also active in writer associations as the vice president of the H.G. Wells Society.

Other awards he has won over the years include the Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire, the Ditmar Award, the Eurocon Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award and the Prix Utopia lifetime achievement award.

Christopher Priest currently makes his home in Hasting, where he lives with Simon and Elizabeth, his twin adult children.

In a career spanning more than six decades, Priest has resisted the tendency to be typecast. He has managed to achieve his chameleone like elusiveness by undoing conventions of genre using the genre’s own conventions.

He has been known for taking what is potentially a stale metaphor, which he makes into a magical trick using immaginate precision. In his very early novels, Christopher Priest made his name as an adept craftsman of the science fiction genre.

He has asserted that his work and especially his genre bending fiction has been influenced by the likes of Franz Kafka and J.G. Ballard. Just like in Kafka’s “Waiting for Godot,” the protagonist of “Indoctrinaire” sees its protagonist trying to make sense of his condition or position.

His fictional strategies have evolved and developed over the years to make for stunning novels over the years.

Christopher Priest’s novel “The Prestige” opens with the story of a young news reporter who suddenly believes that he must have had a twin sibling in his past. He had checked the birth records and noted that he had been adopted as a three year old, but he could find no evidence of a brother or sister.
But he has that telepathy that twins are known to share and he continues with his search. However, this is only a sliver of the story as the real thing is between Alfred Borden, a 19th century magician and Rupert Angier, another magician. Their lives are a web of revelation and deceit, as they vie to expose and outwit each other.

Their rivalry inspires them to greater heights of magic and cunning but this results in some horrific consequences. While they look to destroy each other, they deploy all manner of deception, dark arts and misdirection that magic can command.

Their battle will become a legacy passed on for generations to heirs that will have to untangle the puzzles each magician left.

“The Inverted World” by Christopher Priest is a bizarre story of a city that is being winched through a land filled with hostile enemies. Dragged on rails, the inhabitants need to lay the tracks ahead and remove them once their city has passed.

Mountains and rivers usually provide the most difficult challenges to the brilliant but fallible city engineers. While these are tough challenges the city has to move or else it will get farther and farther behind the optimum and into the life transforming gravitational field the Earth has to deal with.

There are only two alternatives – death or progress. Even though things are tough, the secretive directorate that rules the city keeps the inhabitants in the dark. They have all been raised on synthetic food, common creches and sheltered from the challenges that have become part of human existence.

But in recent times, the citizens have been growing resistive and the city is in crisis. Despite all their efforts the city has been slipping behind the optimum. It is at this time that Helward Mann, one of the most learned of the city’s elite, discovered a very strange world, stranger than anything he ever saw before.

Christopher Priest’s novel “The Affirmation” tells the story of Peter Sinclair, a twenty nine year old that has been through some great personal tragedies. He had lost his job and his flat, had a tempestuous breakup and lost his father.

As such he thought nothing of leaving London to go live in a ramshackle cottage that was a great friend of his deceased father. He planned to live there temporarily and instead of paying rent he would decorate and maintain the home for free. However, once he arrives at the cottage he develops an obsession with journaling the story of his life.

Initially, he tries to pen a straightforward memoir but he cannot make head or tails of anything. Ultimately, he realizes that it is only through falsehood that deeper truths can be revealed.

In his memoir he tells the story of himself now living in Faiandland in the city of Jethra. He has won immortality via lottery but now needs to collect his prize by traveling to Collago, a faraway island where the treatment is to be found.