Arthur Phillips' debut novel, Prague, was the stuff dreams are made of for any novelist -- a best seller, a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and translation into seven languages. It was an especially sweet dream for a guy whose résumé includes playing the tenor sax and a Jeopardy championship.

As any successful novelist will tell you, the accolades ratchet the pressure for the next opus. By all accounts, Phillips has done it again with The Egyptologist, a darkly comic recounting of at least two stories, both involved with searching for a maddeningly elusive goal perhaps (or perhaps not) based in reality. One story follows Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trillipush, who stakes his professional reputation and most of his fiancée's fortune on finding the archive of the last pharaoh of the XIII Dynasty, one Atum-Hadu, or "Atum is aroused." All that Trillipush has going for him is one scrap of pornographic poetry attributed to the lost pharaoh. Intertwined is the account of an orange-haired Australian detective who sets out to solve the mystery of his career, one that brings him too close to Trillipush's expedition.

The Egyptologist opens with Atum-Hadu's name written in hieroglyphs with little left to the imagination. "That was drawn by Marcel Maree, a Dutchman working as a curator on duty for the British Museum's Web site," explains Phillips. "I started writing with the ending of the story first and then started doing research. The British Museum has a great Web site, and I discovered much to my glee that answering questions from the public is part of their mandate. So I became this cyber correspondent, but he must have enjoyed my questions because he kept answering them."

Phillips never set foot in the British Museum until earlier this year, when he finally met Maree and, once again, fact proved stranger than fiction. "He's very young and looks almost like a punk kid. And he's quite an accomplished Egyptologist."

Although Phillips read extensively on ancient Egypt (including Lise Manniche's Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt), the time he's spent there amounts to "four days in Cairo and Giza in 1991. But now that I've established myself as an expert on ancient Egypt, I'd like to go back."

Phillips does seem to be working his way back in time. Prague is set in post-Communist Hungary, where he worked after graduating from Harvard in 1990. "I'd just finished college. I was at loose ends but really wanted to see the world. I wanted to live abroad. I wanted to see something historical happen. I didn't know anybody there; I had no family or language or anything. I got a dumb job there, about which I knew nothing."

But before Prague, Phillips came back to the states and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "I play tenor sax, and I worked hard at it. If I kept working, I'd be OK. Just OK. I was never going to produce anything musically that I'd want to listen to, and I didn't enjoy performing live."

Then there's the five-time Jeopardy championship. "I have a shallow understanding of everything and depth on nothing," says Phillips. His killer categories were "dogs and Shakespeare. And in my day, you got kicked off after winning five games."

Phillips continues going back in time, working on his next novel that "seems to be a Victorian ghost story." When he ends up in the Middle Ages, he'll be back where he started at Harvard in medieval studies.

As much as he loves writing, he prefers talking about writing to teaching.

"I'd rather talk about reading," he says. "The top three on my reading list would be Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual and Moby Dick. I'd be happy to sit around all day and talk about that."

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ARTHUR PHILLIPS will be reading from and signing The Egyptologist at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Thursday at 7 p.m.