"Priest writes extraordinarily well . . . his best novel to date . . . an atmosphere of increasingly oppressive menace." - Francis King, "An original and haunting novel." - "A brilliant and sustained novel of imaginative power." - Peter Sinclair, a 29-year-old Londoner, is reeling after losing his father, his girlfriend, his job and his flat. Taking refuge in a friend's rural cottage, he tries to make sense of things and figure out where his life began to go wrong by writing an autobiography. Peter Sinclair is a 31-year-old native of the city of Jethra in Faiandland who has just won the grand prize in a lottery: a trip to the Dream Archipelago, a neverending series of idyllic islands, where he will undergo a medical procedure that gives him immortality. Because the process also results in total amnesia, Peter must first set down all the details of his life in a manuscript in order to recover the memories afterwards. As the two narratives intersect and intertwine, the reader must decide what is real and what is not in this brilliant literary mindgame from Christopher Priest, the award-winning author of and .