Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the tomb of an apocryphal pharaoh. Phillips, who studied at Harvard and is a five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, explains here what prompted his interest in this unusual subject. We'll leave it to readers to decide just how much to believe.

Readers often challenge authors to identify the myriad streamlets that flowed together to form the river of a novel: How did you think of that? How much is true? How did you research it? To the best of my recollection, here are the tributary events that led to The Egyptologist.

Several years ago, I was at a Kinko's in Sink, Oklahoma, bored, photocopying my remarks for The Sink Literary Festival's panel on The Self in Flight from Itself: Understanding the Author as Pathological Liar when, in the blue recycling bin at my feet, I noticed the distinct first page of a handwritten letter. Despite the poor toner quality, I could make out a date from 1952 and a series of lovelorn complaints. The writer accused Beloved, hated Doris of any number of violations of his love. Oddly, among the other crimes, the writer's wrath was most righteous over a betrayal of some obscure academic debate: But, Doris, your decision to side with the know-nothings of Egyptology in denying the historical veracity of King Atum-hadu has wounded me more than all your petty cruelty, your crude tauntings, your low-cut End of page, and none beneath it. I didn't know anything about Egyptology (I still don't) but the idea of a lover enraged over such a dusty topic caught me.

I certainly didn't have a novel, just a sniff of something, and I didn't smell it again for two years until, at a museum in Thailand, battling the heat and jet lag while walking through an exhibit on the 18th-century Siamese Queen Shlipralithpur, I was bored again. I noticed four young women speaking a Slavic language, maybe Polish. I recognized only two accented words: Shlipralithpur and Atum-hadu. The coincidence awoke me, and I recalled Doris' love-shattering controversial position. What possible relationship could that ancient king have to this opium-gobbling girl-queen of Siam or to these sun-burnt Slavic beauties (who spoke not one word in common with any language I could sputter, but one of whom, when I repeated Atum-hadu, smiled broadly and slowly drew in my notebook a series of the most exquisitely vulgar hieroglyphs)? I was hooked; I smelled the simmering stock of a novel. The process of inspiration is impenetrable, at least at the time, but I remember that I was fiercely determined (in a way I rarely am, as laziness is my ruling humor) to learn about Atum-hadu.

My research took a year. The only public documents even mentioning Atum-hadu were located in the People's Library of Ancient Cultures, a squat 1970s concrete lump in a Beijing neighborhood split between lesser university disciplines and adult-video importers. It took some finagling, but I was permitted a scant 90 minutes of supervised access to the archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I found it at minute 86: the same series of obscene hieroglyphs I had last seen 13 months earlier in Bangkok. I began feverishly copying everything, though of course I couldn't understand the symbols. I managed to scribble only one paragraph in my four minutes. And then the document was snatched away.

Home a week later, I went in search of an Egyptologist to translate the paragraph for me. A cosmic sigh: the very first Egypt scholar I found at my local community college was a young, sun-burnt Russian emigre named Doris. Her translation:

The invaders cut through Atum-hadu's defenders. Their faces spattered with the blood of a decade's slaughter, their howls ringing out as they reached at last for their prize, maddened by their strict diet of war, promised blinding plunder and terrified victims, they poured into Atum-hadu's court. There they gaped at the defiantly exuberant courtiers of Atum-hadu: feasting, dancing to the intricate music of their king's composition, riding trained camels and, along the defenses, on the floors, and on tables engaging one another in combinations and postures the invaders could never have conceived of, even after a decade of desert isolation where their thoughts had nowhere to turn but upon the faraway pleasures of the flesh.

Doris read the translation to me in her lilting accent as a dusty sunbeam alit on her face, and soon after I began work on the novel which is now The Egyptologist.

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon emigration had faded into a hazy foundational myth: corny or romantic or shameful, depending on your demographic. I knew it had been none of those. It had been a real event in which real people had taken an incredible leap of faith. What had made them leave safe homes for the unknown? What had they found? I could only guess. But just knowing their stories had given me a willingness to take risks and to endure life's inconveniences, to value survival skills.
As a teacher, I took teenagers into the wilderness and saw how many had no idea what humans were capable of. I told stories of explorers and emigrants and Native Americans how they'd lived and what they'd done. These stories had the power to change their outlooks, too. This history seemed too important to forget, to laugh at or dismiss. That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable with my colonial legacy. My college years had been informed by the new environmental movement, by AIM, by the rage of historical revisionism that cast Americans not as victims or heroes but as monstrous aggressors. But I knew, again, that the people in conflict at the time had seen a much more complex picture, different from any historical recasting.

I never expected to exorcise my conqueror's guilt, but it did seem necessary to understand this story from the ground from inside those who'd been there. So I wrote, and when the year was out, I realized my presumption. Grand intentions had done nothing but produce a fiction, as absurd as any other, and I was expecting a first child. I put the project away, resolved to make better use of my time. Then, with no less presumption, my husband and I quit our jobs and moved to an Idaho farm. With no money or work to fall back on, driving a trailer full of goats and horses, cats and hens, we arrived on 50 acres and soon had to fix tractors, build barns, dig cellars, grow food. What had we been thinking? Six years passed. I had a girl, then a boy. Each winter I tried to write. By then I'd ridden country once mapped by Hudson's Bay fur traders, snowshoed through winters so long and bleak that I'd come to see how color vermilion or a string of beads could become currency. Now a mother, I'd wondered how one eloquent trader had endured a winter in which his whole family died of smallpox. I'd stood on old village sites, pondered churches built by rival missionaries, learned to butcher deer and split cordwood from a Nez Perce neighbor. Summer days of hoeing and diapering had taught me things I'd never guessed about poverty. Each month brought some new lesson, and for a writer, the most important one was this: that facts and ideas were not enough to write from. Only by feeling a life could I understand it. Only by living could I feel it. Then I was given an account handed down by a true ancestor. Emma Mitchell was 11 when she crossed to Oregon in 1847. Desperate toward the journey's end, her family won permission to winter at the Whitman mission. A month later, the Cayuse massacred the mission's American men, took the women and children hostage. From my farm I could almost see that place, but never imagined my connection. Or guessed that but for a pair of stolen stockings, I might well not exist.

To take up those dry husks of words and know a woman who once woke from dreams, pressed her lips to an infant's hair, found her courage, kept a secret; to know a man who had split wood, built barns, lost love to know these things was to know my new ability to speak for those whose lives had been reduced to names in the backs of Bibles, a saved lock of hair, old pages lit to fire kindling. I abandoned years of drafts, everything I'd done, and began again, hoping (with less presumption now), to honor them.

Karen Fisher now lives with her husband and three children on an island in Puget Sound.

Though it’s a novel, Galway Bay is based on the life of my great-great-grandmother, a story I only discovered after years of research. I didn’t even know her name on that October morning in 1979 when my dad and I walked into the office of the Galway City Clerk—two more Irish-Americans looking for their ancestors.
“My name is Michael Kelly,” my father said.

“We’ve a county full of Michael Kellys,” the man replied. Wasn’t Kelly the second most common name in Ireland, right there next to Murphy, and wasn’t Galway “Kelly Country”?

What details did we have about our Kellys? Townland? No. Parish? No. Dates? Only that our ancestors left Ireland in the 1840s or ’50s.

“Along with two million others,” the clerk said.

My dad raised his eyebrows at me. He’d been skeptical about “this whole roots thing” anyway. He was very proud of being Irish. We all were. But Ireland itself didn’t really come into it.

We were Chicago Irish with roots in Bridgeport. “The Cradle of Kings,” my dad only half-jokingly called the neighborhood that gave our city its mayors, beginning with his own cousin Ed Kelly, and continuing through Mayor Daley.

I’d been visiting Ireland off and on for 10 years and I was fascinated by the place. I longed to show him a country richer and more complex than the land he’d seen on a one-week tour with my mom and friends from Chicago. I planned to spend the fall studying in Ireland. Would he travel with me for the first two weeks? “Go on, Mike,” my mom said and surprising himself, he agreed.

We were having a great time. He enjoyed the landscape, the music, the people. My dad delighted in the conversation, enjoyed the turns of phrase and the humor that was so like his own. Though he did comment on the low voices, the guardedness. “A nation of conspirators,” he said.

But the tangible connection to “our Kellys” that I wanted seemed impossible. The town clerk shook his head, sad for us. The Diaspora. Cut off forever. But then he smiled. He held up a wonderful old-fashioned fountain pen.

“Pope John Paul II used this to sign our visitors book when he was here last week. Two hundred and eighty thousand went to the Mass he celebrated on the Galway Race Course.” Then the clerk raised the pen and used it to make a quick sign of the cross on my father’s forehead. A papal blessing once-removed.

Then he handed my dad the pen. “Here. Now you sign your name in the book.” So there on the page facing the pope’s signature, my father wrote: Michael J. Kelly, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

“There,” the clerk said. “You are entered on the official rolls of the county of your ancestors. Welcome home.”

The men shook hands. Perfect.

My dad had always been impatient with details. “Summarize,” he’d say to my sisters and brother and me when we’d start rambling through some story. Get to the point. And now he had. He had reconnected to the 2,000-year history of the Kellys in Ireland. Officially. Done.

We continued our trip, driving along Galway Bay and through Connemara. Somehow we felt less like tourists.

For me the search had only begun. I went back to the U.S. and did my homework, cranking through microfilm census rolls, calling relatives I didn’t know, hunting for death certificates, checking cemetery records. Anyone who does genealogy knows what it’s like—two steps forward, one step back. Right name, possible date—oops, not related. And then the joy when our ancestors emerge. I searched libraries in the U.S. and Ireland, and then the Irish computerized their church records, and the floodgates opened.

Genealogy is called a hobby, but that word can’t convey how soul-sustaining the information gathered can be. All of our ancestors endured so much—war, famine, pogroms, genocide, the middle passage, slavery. Yet they survived, because here we are. Our lives are their victory.

“Thank you,” I said to Honora Keeley Kelly when I stood where she’d been born in 1822, in the village of Bearna/Freeport, right on the shores of Galway Bay.
I wish my dad were still alive to read Galway Bay. He’d say that there are a lot of pages. But I’d assure him it moves fast. I didn’t cover all 2,000 years. I summarized.

Galway Bay, the story of one family’s Irish American experience, is the second novel by Mary Pat Kelly, a former television producer who has written several nonfiction books. She lives in New York.