There was this large world of rolling time and shifting spaces, and that small, stilled world of horror and unease they fit inside each other, a sphere within a sphere.It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the West Coast 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 sum of money 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.From the author of the award-winning global phenomenon The Rehearsal comes a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems.The Man Booker Prize chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described the book as a dazzling work, luminous, vast. It is, he said, a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery. Each of its 12 chapters halves in length which gives the narrative a sense of acceleration. It is not, however, an extended exercise in literary form. Macfarlane and his fellow judges were impressed by Catton's technique but it was her extraordinarily gripping narrative that enthralled them. We read it three times and each time we dug into it the yields were extraordinary, its dividends astronomical. The Luminaries is, said Macfarlane, a novel with heart. The characters are in New Zealand to make and to gain the one thing that disrupts them is love.Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand. Her debut novel The Rehearsal won the Adam Prize and was Best First Book of Fiction at the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Internationally, it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize, and won the 2009 Betty Trask Award. It has been published in 17 territories and 12 languages. Eleanor Catton holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she also held an adjunct professorship, and an MA in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. She lives in Auckland.

Featured in the 17 March 2014New Zealand newsletter.
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ubiq Staff Pick! by Briar

The word Dickensian has been thrown around with regard to Eleanor Cattons sophomore release, "The Luminaries", and its certainly got the Victorian grittiness and impressive page count that one would expect from any decent Dickens novel. But its so much more than that. Catton may only be in her late twenties, but her ability to enter into the minds of the multitude of key characters almost all male, from all kinds of ethnic, social and moral backgrounds is staggering. The descriptions of Hokitika and the surrounding lands are beautifully evocative, the constant presence at the beginning of chapters of an omniscient narrator feels like a reassuring indicator that the mysteries will all unfold. And Cattons ability to stick to period style writing and editing in a completely believable fashion is dned impressive.

Despite the books length, you are drawn into the various mysteries at hand almost immediately, and between the evocative writing and the constant unraveling of the mysterious strands of stories, its thoroughly unputdownable. Its a historical novel, a mystery, with a touch of the fantastical (the omnipresent references to the zodiac) all by a young contemporary New Zealand author, whose future works will have the worlds attention. Highly, highly recommended."