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From the bestselling author of Prague
comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about
an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal
king. This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the
desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the
slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston by way of Oxford,
the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court
in turmoil.
Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb
of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history
of archaeology, Oxford-educated
Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble,
having staked his professional reputation and his fiancée’s
fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile,
a relentless Australian detective sets off on the case of
his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer. And
another murderer. And possibly another murderer. The confluence
of these seemingly separate stories results in an explosive
ending, at once inevitable and utterly unpredictable.
Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable
climax with all the wit and narrative bravado that made Prague
one of the most critically acclaimed novels of 2002. Exploring
issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger
for eternal life, this staggering second novel gives us a
glimpse of Phillips’s range and maturity–and
is sure to earn him further acclaim as one of the most exciting
authors of his generation.
ARTHUR PHILLIPS’s first novel, Prague,
was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book,
recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for
First Fiction, and has been translated into seven languages.
Phillips lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
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