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.

Dave Pringle reviewed The Affirmation for Imagine magazine, and stated that "it is slow-moving, painstaking, flatly-written ... and yet it builds up a charge - it moves the reader.

"[1] In his 2020 book The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, Paul Kincaid recalls that "reviews were lukewarm" for The Affirmation when it was first published, but it is "now generally recognized as one of his finest novels.