Arthur Phillips search for meaning in life. The novel was well received commercially and critically, winning Phillips the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, as well as other honors. "The Egyptologist" is structured as journals, letters, telegrams, and drawings, from several different points of view. The main story is set in 1922 and follows a hopeful explorer who, working near Howard Carter (the man who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun), risks more and more of his life and savings on an apparently quixotic effort to find the tomb of an apocryphal Egyptian king. The book was an
William D. Boyce travel into Germany and Austria for six weeks to report on the industrial and commercial effects of the war on those countries. He sent extensive reports to his newspapers and returned home around April–May. In late 1922, Boyce departed on another expedition to Africa, this time for six months. Morocco reminded him of the Dakotas, Kansas, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. In Egypt he visited the tomb of Tutankhamun, which had been discovered just a few months earlier. His expedition then went to Luxor and sailed up the Nile River to Edfu, where the houses had no roofs and while he