This was an epic novel. Reading this in quarantine, when I have the attention span of a flea, was a challenge given its length, but honestly, it was worth the effort. Beautifully written with a wealth of interesting, original characters, the book was genre defying— a Wild West tale dressed up as the...
Let's start this review with something that's just housekeeping, not criticism. I read this book as part of a CanLit project. It won the (Canadian) Governor General's award, after all. But this is CanLit only by the most attenuated of courtesies; Catton may have been born in Canada, but she grew up ...
My god, I made it. Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning first novel is not for the faint-hearted. It is long. And I mean long. It’s also historical fiction, which really isn’t my bag, but ten minutes in, I was hooked. It’s set in New Zealand in 1866 and follows a group of men in a small frontier go...
I am applying the 50-page test to this one: I'm on page 57 and ambivalent. On the positive side, there's very good writing, keen observation, and an interesting setting (New Zealand in 1866, during a gold rush). On the negative side, I'd managed to overlook that this is a mystery and a ghost story, ...
70. THE LUMINARIES, BY ELEANOR CATTONAnother recommendation by mysamwise! And I have to say, I liked this one much better... But we’ve already covered that. Onto this one!Synopsis: Walter Moody, recently almost destitute and at odds with his family, arrives upon the shores of New Zealand hoping to ...
When I turned the last page of the book, my first reaction was “whew’! It took me a long time to read this book. There were so many characters, and although the author carefully developed them, some were easier to remember than others. They were all related in some way, as each had some unusual conn...
Disappointing. At first, a gold rush & a murder sounded intriguing. I liked that the chapter lengths resembled a waning moon. The initial atmosphere was well written, burning slowly to leave a sense of suffocating tension. However, the rest of the book was unsatisfactory. Nothing wrong with a twisti...
I did enjoy this book. The story is rich and involved. It was interesting how the characters evolved as the story progressed. However I was quite distracted by the astrological structure of the story. I would like to read it again so that I can just get lost in the story and the characters. I think ...
It's 1866 in the gold town of Hokitika, New Zealand. Walter Moody, a young man seeking his fortune on the goldfields, rocks up in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel to find a group of twelve men who've gathered to discuss a series of crimes in which they all seem to be implicated, unwillingly but d...
Important: Our sites use cookies.
We use the information stored using cookies and similar technologies for advertising and statistics purposes.
Stored data allow us to tailor the websites to individual user's interests.
Cookies may be also used by third parties cooperating with BookLikes, like advertisers, research companies and providers of multimedia applications.
You can choose how cookies are handled by your device via your browser settings.
If you choose not to receive cookies at any time, BookLikes will not function properly and certain services will not be provided.
For more information, please go to our Privacy Policy.
Log in with Facebook 
