The Luminaries
Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866 and walks into a meeting of twelve men who are trying to work out a series of crimes committed in the town.
About
The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton, published by McClelland and Stewart and awarded the Man Booker Prize that year. It is set on New Zealand's South Island in 1866, in the goldrush settlement of Hokitika, and it follows Walter Moody, a prospector who has come to make his fortune.
Moody walks into a room where twelve local men have gathered to discuss a set of crimes: a disappearance, a death and a fortune that belongs to nobody who will claim it. Each of the men holds a piece of the account, and the novel reveals them one at a time, so the reader learns the story in the same order a newcomer to the town does.
Catton built the book on an astrological scheme, with the twelve men corresponding to signs and the chapters shortening as the story advances, so the form is part of the plot rather than a decoration. It is a long novel written in the manner of the century it describes, and its story arrives through documents and testimony as much as through scenes.
Book details
- Author
- Eleanor Catton
- First published
- 2013
- Series
- No series listed
- Subgenre
- Literary historical fiction, Historical mystery, Family saga
- Primary genre
- Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
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