Grant Buday’s new novel is an eccentric coming-of-age story that captures the late-Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt, auras, and the afterlife.

Smart, stubborn, and forthright Pearl Greyland-Smith is nine years old when we first meet her, in 1882. She lives with her widowed mother, Florence, in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood. Pearl’s father was a Hussar who died in Afghanistan, or that’s what Florence has always told Pearl. But when an Irish woman named Cassidy arrives at their door and addresses Florence as Sinead, Pearl begins to realize she may not know very much about her origins at all.

An avid reader with a rich inner life, as Pearl grows up she nonetheless confronts the scarcity of choices available to women. Yet while lacking in certain amenities, Pearl and Florence’s days are anything but dull, populated by characters easily at home in a Dickens novel: the earnest and enigmatic amateur scientist Charles Gloster, their bawdy, theosophist housemaid Carpy, inspector Osmo Beattie, and imperialist newspaper columnist Harry Hearne. Then a fateful encounter at a solstice fête throws Pearl’s whole future into question.

This delightful coming-of-age story, imbued with the Victorian fascination for auras and the afterlife, will appeal to readers of Patrick DeWitt and Eleanor Catton. Once again Grant Buday has turned distant West Coast history upside down and created a vivid world intimately relevant to us today.

Grant Buday is the author of four novels: Rootbound, White Lung (Anvil Press), Under Glass, The Venetian, and A Sack of Teeth. White Lung was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize, as was his last collection of stories, Monday Night Man (Anvil Press). The Green Gold Rush, a screenplay based on the marijuana industry in BC, was a co-winner of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters spring 1998 screenplay development workshop.

Grant Buday's profile page

"It’s a fast-paced novel that describes a lively, dangerous, and often humorous chase." —The BC Review

"In the Belly of the Sphinx elicits far more smiles of amusement than shivers of dread. It’s outlandish: historical fiction with a wink. . . fans of tall tales, good lively writing, appealing characters, Wildean one-liners, wacky plots and/or unabashed entertainment — Buday’s eighth novel can do no wrong." —Vancouver Sun

"This charming coming-of-age story . . . brings to life the Victorian era on B.C.’s West Coast." —Montecristo

"Buday's brilliant use of language and evocation of early years in the city of Victoria keeps us firmly ensconced in the colonial version of the Victorian era . . . One is inevitably reminded of a modem-day Charles Dickens . . . Buday has contributed yet another smart, impeccably researched, highly literate yet never stuffy, slyly hilarious and thoroughly engaging book for his fans." —BC Bookworld