The Magus: John Fowles

Nicholas Urfe - young, English, conventionally brought up and educated - leaves London for a job as a schoolmaster on a lonely Greek island. He thinks this will be an escape from the confines of society and from Alison, his latest victim in a long line of callous and casual seductions. Despite an obscure warning, Nicholas is totally unprepared for the ordeal that awaits him. At one end of the island is a colonnaded villa, where he meets the urbane Maurice Conchis, a remote yet compelling figure; rich, cosmopolitan and a self-styled psychic. Between Maurice and Nicholas begins a cat-and-mouse game that Nicholas finds puzzling, then patronising -then a direct challenge. He is led through a series of elaborately staged tableaux and although he senses an imposture, he is unwilling to withdraw from the promise of a momentous revelation. He is drawn on and on and into the Saturnalian labyrinth, where truth and illusion rest o the barest shift of perception...until Nicholas perceives the maelstrom centre of Conchis's plot...