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.

Bertrand William Sinclair (1881–1972) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1889. At age fifteen, he ran away from home to become a cowboy in Montana, after which he returned to Canada, settling in BC where he depicted in numerous novels the lives of loggers, fishermen and ranchers. Sinclair was enormously successful as a novelist; his novel North of '53 sold 340,000 copies. After 1922, he made his home in Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast and became a commercial fisherman. His VHF radio broadcasts to fishermen, known as “The Sinclair Hour,” were widely known and respected. He did not retire from commercial fishing until age 83.

Bertrand W. Sinclair's profile page