National Network for Equitable Library Service

Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Inverted Pyramid, a best-seller when it was first published in 1924, appears now for the first time in a new edition. Writing in the period from 1908 onwards, Sinclair published over fifteen novels, some of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. In The Inverted Pyramid, which critics often cite as his most ambitious novel, he explores Canada's drift during WWI from a world of production to one based on finance, with all the attendant problems we are still enduring today. The novel offers a colourful account of British Columbia during this time through the history of two brothers — Rod and Grove Norquay — who belong to an old BC family. Grove, the older brother, takes the family's assets and invests them in finance — with disastrous consequences. As the world declines into a depression, Rod is forced to liquidate much of his family's timber holdings, but he remains hopeful that he and family, working with their own hands, will be able to make a good life for themselves — even as the rest of the world totters into the horrors of modernity.