The Prestige

The Prestige opens in the present day. Andrew Westley, a London journalist who was adopted as a small child, has always felt he had a twin brother, though no record says he did. He is summoned to Caldlow House, an English manor, by Kate Angier, who tells him that she knew him when they were children and saw her father kill him. Between them they hold their ancestors' papers, and the novel lays those papers out one after another.

The first is the account of Alfred Borden, a Victorian stage magician; the second is the diary of his rival, Rupert Angier. Their feud begins in 1878, when Borden tries to expose a séance Angier is conducting, and in the struggle Angier's pregnant wife, Julia, is hurt and miscarries. Borden goes on to perform The New Transported Man, in which he appears to cross the stage from one cabinet to another in an instant. Angier cannot fathom the trick and goes to Colorado, where Nikola Tesla builds him a machine that really does what Borden only seems to do, at a dreadful cost: every use leaves a body behind. Borden's secret is simpler and stranger. He is two men, identical twins sharing one life and one name. When Borden cuts the power to Angier's machine in the middle of a show, Angier is split in two, and the damage runs down both families for a century. In the vault at Caldlow House, Andrew finds the preserved body of a small boy labeled Nicholas Julius Borden, and he and Kate learn that some form of Rupert Angier has survived in the house to the present.

The book is built like a magic act: the author's own website describes a narrative that "tells no lies, but revelations and unexpected twists occur at regular intervals." The Victorian voices are careful and dry, and the pace is patient, so the strangeness creeps up. Kirkus called it an "unexpectedly compelling fusion of weird science and legerdemain." Anyone who has seen the film should still read it; the novel keeps secrets the film does not.