The Magician is the central novel—its final draft spanning twenty years—by John Fowles, one of the most singular English novelists; a writer deeply concerned with the great philosophical and intellectual themes of our time, who is also an extraordinary storyteller who irresistibly draws the reader in.

Enormously rich, complex, and ambitious—with elements of the Gothic novel, the thriller, the coming-of-age story, the erotic novel, and the philosophical novel—this work follows the sentimental education of young Nicholas, who leaves London and his lover and settles on a remote Greek island as an English teacher. There he meets a mysterious character, an eccentric millionaire, Conchis, the Magician, who involves him, often against his will, in strange experiences. Fascinated by this enigmatic magician, who sends him to seduce two twin sisters, Nicholas is led through a complex game of inventions, charades, and multiple sets—a kind of Supreme Game—to the shifting boundaries between reality and dream.

What is the purpose of these unsettling experiences? How can we discern their meaning, their degree of scientific rigor, metaphysical intuition, or pure trickery? And above all, Nicholas wonders anxiously, who is Conchis really? A being endowed with supernatural powers? A capricious despot who stages his own fantasies to disturb fragile sensibilities? A psychiatrist who, in the name of science, continues the study of a "case"? A recurring and emblematic circuit in this captivating work: from appearance to suspicion and the unmasking of this appearance as a lie, and then to suspicion of that new appearance: the final mask is never removed.

The Magician, like all his work, is marked by mystery, its central axis; by the search for individual authenticity; by eroticism and the domination of women by men, tinged with sadism—it is no coincidence that the novel opens with a quote from the divine Marquis. Jean Ruer has described this novel, founded on more or less disguised existentialist premises, as "a kind of history of the consciousness of the Western world in the 20th century."

Fowles wrote that with this work he wanted to create "a fable about man and his conception of God," that is, "human illusions about something that does not actually exist: absolute knowledge and absolute power," and about the destruction of both illusions.