First UK edition. Published by Jonathan Cape, London in 1966.
 
The book is in very good condition overall, with some small tears and wear to the edges. The jacket is illustrated by Tom Adams. 
 
The Magus follows Nicholas Urfe, a young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet who is mentally deteriorating while teaching on a small Greek Island. Nicholas becomes depressed and falls into a friendship with Maurice Conchis, a wealthy and mysterious man who severs Nicholas' grip on reality through elaborate mind games.
 
The story was inspired by John Fowles' time teaching on the Greek island of Spetses as a young man. The Magus was the first book Fowles wrote but the third to be published. An immediate sensation, the plot reverberated the experimental philosophy of the 1960s, and it was adapted into a film shortly after its publication.
 
For some readers, it is Fowles's best book. For Fowles himself, it was "the first one I wrote [and] still, I think, excites me more than the others. It still slightly puzzles me how I could have written it."