The Luminaries
From the author of The Rehearsal and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems....It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his...
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From the author of The Rehearsal and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems....It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy 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 prostitute 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.Eleanor Catton was only 22 when she wrote The Rehearsal, which Adam Ross in the New York Times Book Review praised as "a wildly brilliant and precocious first novel" and Joshua Ferris called "a mesmerizing, labyrinthine, intricately patterned and astonishingly original novel." The Luminaries amply confirms that early promise, and secures Catton's reputation as one of the most dazzling and inventive young writers at work today.
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Format: kindle
ASIN: B00BAXFAJC
Publish date: October 15th 2013
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages no: 832
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Historical Fiction,
Literary Fiction,
Adult,
Mystery,
Contemporary,
Canada
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 ...
8 years ago
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