Abacus Books
3 total works
Christopher Priest's artful sleight of hand when it comes to manipulating the experience of his books and notions of what is real reaches a peak in this novel that accounts the trials and tribulations of a group of people who have escaped into a utopian shared virtual reality known as Wessex. It is a world engineered to give them their every desire. But when one woman becomes subject to the violent attentions of a man who feels that she is everything he desires she must decide to fight back. Obsession and abuse of power can cross from the real world to the imagined all too easily.
Thought by some to have been instrumental in the inspiration of the film INCEPTION, A DREAM OF WESSEX is a classic in the literature of virtual realities and remains one of Chris Priest's most highly regarded novels.
THE QUIET WOMAN stitches together a horrifyingly plausable near-future dystopian Britain and a typically Priestian account of an individual lost in the blurred boundaries between the real and the imagined. It is a novel that bears comparison with the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and A.S. Byatt as well as that of John Wyndham.
In a country that has lost its way memories of past lives are distracting Alice Stockton. Living alone after the break up of her marriage she makes a precarious living as a biographer yet finds herself powerfully and inexplicably influenced by the lives of others.
A novel of uncertain personal histories and literary mystery set in a disturbingly real dystopian Britain, THE QUIET WOMAN is vintage Christopher Priest.