The Prestige

Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden are rival stage illusionists in the music halls of Victorian England. Angier is an aristocrat, Borden comes from the working class, and their rivalry turns bitter and then deadly. Each watches the other from the edges of his private life, held there by a need to keep his own secrets and an itch to learn the other's.

At the centre of the quarrel is one remarkable illusion that both men perform in their acts. The book does not hide how the trick works, and the reader knows the method early on. The real puzzle lies elsewhere, because each man guards something more than the mechanics of a stage effect.

The feud does not die with the performers. A hundred years later, their families are still living with what it did, so the story reaches from the gaslight and velvet of the theatres into the present day.

This is a historical novel about obsession and rivalry, with a shadowy, watchful tone. Reading it means following a mystery whose answer is not the one the trick suggests, with the tension coming from motive and concealment rather than from the method.