The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton

Granta, 2013 - Crime - 832 pages

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction, which more than fulfils the promise of The Rehearsal. Like that novel, it is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - kara.shamy - LibraryThing

Originally composed 10/13/13 on goodreads.com The Luminaries is, I think, a historic literary achievement. If it doesn't win this year's Man Booker Prize, you'll be able to knock me over with a ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - DavidWylie - LibraryThing

At the back of my Little, Brown paperback in an interview with the author, Eleanor Catton complaints – at the interviewer’s prompting – about the focus on her being the youngest winner of the Booker ...

About the author

Eleanor Catton was born in Canada on September 24, 1985. She moved to New Zealand with her family when she was six years old. She studied English at the University of Canterbury and received a master's in creative writing at The Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, was published in 2008. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In 2015 she ws made an Honorary Literary Fellows in the New Zealand Society of Authors' annual Waitangi Day Honours. In 2016, she was named as one of six, Arts New Zealand's Laureate Award winners.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Luminaries; Booker Prize for Fiction
• Author: Eleanor Catton
• Publisher: Granta, 2013
• ISBN: 1847088767, 9781847088765
• Length: 832 pages