The Prestige is a novel.
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents . The Prestige is a 1995 novel by British writer Christopher Priest . The novel tells the story of a prolonged feud between two stage magicians in late 1800s England . The title derives from the novel 's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts : the setup , the performance , and the prestige ( effect ) . The novel received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel .