Claim: The Prestige is a book.

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 . It is epistolary in structure ; that is , it purports to be a collection of real diaries that were kept by the protagonists and later collated . The title derives from the novel 's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts : the setup , the performance , and the prestige -LRB- effect -RRB- .   The novel received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel .