Ptolemy's Gate

Ptolemy's Gate came out in Britain in September 2005 and in America that December, and it closes the Bartimaeus trilogy. A prequel, The Ring of Solomon, followed in 2010.

The setting is an alternate London in which magicians form the ruling class and keep their power by summoning spirits to control everyone else. The year is about 2005, three years on from the last book, and the trilogy's long quarrel between its two central figures is coming to a head.

Woven through the present-day story are flashbacks to Egypt in 126 BCE, where the magician Ptolemy calls up Bartimaeus. Ptolemy has no interest in power or glory; what he wants from the djinni is an account of the Other Place, the realm the spirits come from, and he is trying to write a book that would close the gap between human beings and the djinn, which in his world is a relationship of exploitation. Bartimaeus is wary of him at first, and then forms a close attachment to him, protecting him from assassins sent by his own family.