The Affirmation
Christopher Priest
 Peter Sinclair endures professional unemployment and the breakup of a long-term relationship, and tries to escape his self-perceived newfound social marginality through creating an intricate fantasy fiction. In this world, he depicts himself as the winner of a lottery in the (fictional) Dream Archipelago, where the jackpot prize is a complex medical and neural operation (“athanasia”) that will ensure immortality. As he writes, working ever deeper into his psyche, Sinclair finds that his two identities are starting to merge, although it may also be the case that Peter is experiencing visual and auditory hallucination symptoms attributable to the onset of schizophrenia. The novel's climax leaves the fact ambiguous as to which world is real and which is fantasy, with the novel ending in the same unfinished sentence as Sinclair's manuscript.