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Summary and Reviews of The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The Luminaries

A Novel

by Eleanor Catton
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  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • First Published:
  • Oct 15, 2013, 848 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2014, 864 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

From the author of The Rehearsal comes 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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    Booker Prize
    2013

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

This is a book for a patient reader – one who is willing to savor the small moments and precise painting of a town and the characters living within its boundaries. With the meticulous attention given to detail, it is as though Catton is building a place and populating it too. Both the characters and the plot are complex and complicated. At times I felt as though I was working a sort of puzzle, trying to fit together pieces I wasn't sure were from the same box...continued

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(Reviewed by Sarah Tomp).

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Beyond the Book



New Zealand's Gold Rush

The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand town of Hokitika during the nineteenth century gold rush. Hokitika is located on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, which is one of three areas in the country where gold was found to be in sufficient quantity to mine.

Rumors of gold in a small part of New Zealand's North Island surfaced in the 1820s, but it wasn't until the first substantial discovery in 1852 in the center of the South Island that the search for gold began in earnest. The majority of New Zealand miners were British—coming most recently from the goldmines of the southern Australian state of Victoria. Chinese immigrants participated in the exploration as well as native Maoris.

Mining for gold along beaches Gold mining was a tough ...

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