Product Description

Cameraman Richard Grey's memory has blanked out the few weeks before he was injured in a car bomb explosion. When he is visited by a girl who seems to have been his lover, his attempts to recall the forgotten period produce an odyssey through France and conflicting accounts of what happened. When Susan Kewley speaks to him of that time, he finds himself glimpsing a terrible twilight world - the world of "the glamour".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270329 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

The Independent
"A tightly narrated slice of psychological horror."

Review
"A tightly narrated slice of psychological horror." (The Independent )

"[a] cool, understated chiller. Priest's control over his story will keep you turning the pages as events slowly twist their way to an unseen climax." (Brian J. Robb DREAMWATCH )

About the Author
Christopher Priest's novels have built him an inimitable dual reputation as a contemporary novelist and a leading figure in modern SF and fantasy. His novel THE PRESTIGE is unique in winning both a major literary prize (the James Tait Black Award) and a major genre prize (The World Fantasy Award); THE SEPARATION won both the Arthur C. Clarke and the British Science Fiction Awards. He was selected for the original Best of Young British Novelists in1983.

Customer Reviews

Truth and fiction
The Glamour is a wonderful story of a man who, caught by the blast from a car bomb, is trying to recover his memory, with the best hope apparently a woman who claims to have been his lover.

But this being a Christopher Priest book more is going on than that. Priest uses his trick of changing the perspective on the story, without suggesting that any particular point of view is more valid than another, leaving you guessing as to what is going on.

I always think of Priest as being the British Philip K. Dick, a man who loves writing about shifting realities. The difference being that whereas Dick seemed compelled to write and would often write hurriedly, Priest is a more considered writer, his prose is more elegant. Similarly Priest is more concerned with the middle classes than Dick's blue collar heroes. And in this book, Priest is doing what Dick would have done more of, had his publishers been more daring, he writes a book that seems like science fiction but isn't. Not really. It's more about relationships and stories and glamour. The science fiction or fantasy element is very slight and if you look at the story in a certain way, does not necessarily exist.

The book is beautifully ambiguous and the fractured nature of this review just testifies to the fact that no review can do it justice. You just have to read it. And then all of Priest's other books. He's that good.

Maddening and superb
I have read and reread this book, and it still drives me up the wall! No other book has ever had such an effect on me or on the other people I gave the book to. This edition (1996) is actually a rewritten version of the original.The author had received such a large amount of mail from similarly maddened readers, that he decided to change a couple of details. Whether he created a better book or not is debateable, but the essential twists and turns of story and narrator remain. To say too much about the story would spoil the surprise of potential readers, but I can say that the inherent mystery will change the way you look at the world. Read, read and read again. Remember, the best books make you think for a long time after you have turned the last page.

Superlatives begin to fail....
Christopher Priest is a superb writer. Using simple direct and unornamented prose he weaves a world where nothing is quite what it seems but where the impact of what he writes is stupendous.

To reveal the storyline in a review like this would be grossly unfair but this is probably one of the two best books I have read this year -- and I read lots.

The writing is crystal clear and unaffected. The story is superbly constructed with the author fully in command of the twists of the plot. Priest's writing is absolutely unimprovable. Why isn't this man at the top of the best-seller lists?