His first novel, Prague, was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and the recipient of the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum prize for best first novel. It has been translated into eight languages.

The Egyptologist is his second novel. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Phillips follows up his first novel, the best-selling Prague (2002), with an equally inventive if totally unexpected foray into ancient Egypt. The novel is artfully constructed in the form of letters and journal entries written by unreliable narrators, the primary one being erstwhile Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush. Obsessed with fragments of hieroglyphic pornography reputed to be the work of King Atum-hadu, Ralph talks his opium-addicted fiancee’s wealthy father into bankrolling his expedition to Egypt, where he hopes to unearth the king’s tomb. Meanwhile, his every move is being tracked by dogged detective Harold Ferrell, who thinks Ralph is not only a fraud but also a murderer. There are many funny bits about Ralph’s tendency to romanticize all things Egypt and about his burning jealousy of Howard Carter, the real-life archaeologist who discovered King Tut’s tomb; in addition, the novel’s layered construction cleverly reveals the reality beneath Ralph’s endlessly self-serving commentary. Some readers might find the amount of pharaonic minutiae tedious reading, but it all serves to support the novel’s shocking yet entirely credible ending and its themes of the longing for immortality and the nature of identity. Phillips proves himself once again to be a wildly creative storyteller.

From the critically-acclaimed, best-selling 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 novel opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, before winding its way from the slums of 1900s Australia to the ballrooms of 1920s Boston, by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, a royal court in turmoil in 1700 BC, and an idyllic English country house where nothing is quite as it should be.

Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history of Egyptology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancee'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 culminate 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 the best-selling 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 a glimpse of Phillips’ range and maturity, and is sure to earn him acclaim as one of the most exciting novelists of his generation.

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