The Luminaries

By: Eleanor Catton

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

Length: 29 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Longlisted – Baileys Women’s Prize 2014

Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2013

Canadian Governor General's Literary Award, 2013.

It is 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 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 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.

The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th-century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will confirm for critics and listeners that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study for a year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in the US and went on to hold a position as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing there, teaching Creative Writing and Popular Culture. Eleanor won a 2010 New Generation Award. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

©2013 Eleanor Catton (P)2013 Audible Ltd

Critic reviews

"The Luminaries is an impressive novel, captivating, intense and full of surprises." (Times Literary Supplement)

"The Luminaries is a breathtakingly ambitious 800-page mystery with a plot as complex and a cast as motley as any 19th-century doorstopper. That Catton's absorbing, hugely elaborate novel is at its heart so simple is a great part of its charm. Catton's playful and increasingly virtuosic denouement arrives at a conclusion that is as beautiful as it is triumphant." (Daily Mail)

"It is awesomely - even bewilderingly - intricate. There's an immaculate finish to Catton's prose, which is no mean feat in a novel that lives or dies by its handling of period dialogue. It's more than 800 pages long but the reward for your stamina is a double-dealing world of skullduggery traced in rare complexity. Those Booker judges will have wrists of steel if it makes the shortlist, as it fully deserves." (Evening Standard)

great mystery novel

Like an Agatha Christie story all grown up. The narration and story will keep you listening for hours!

nice to hear before watching series on Starz

so many people in the beginning to keep track of, need to pay attention otherwise you too could be lost.

A just okay book

I was pretty disappointed in this story. It was very predictable & boring. I continued to read the story in hopes that it would get better, but it never did.

Excellent performance by the narrator!

Would you consider the audio edition of The Luminaries to be better than the print version?

I loved the story, which dips forward and backward. It is exceptionally well-written, authentic language for the time period. Good story, unusual. I am not sure what I liked more the story or the narration. Mark Meadows has an incredible back for changing accents! Thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining.

If you could take any character from The Luminaries out to dinner, who would it be and why?

If I were to take a character out to dinner I think it would have to be Emery Staines. He sounds like a charming, inquisitive young man.

What a magnificent case of characters

I reread several parts of this story. I was fascinated by the intrigue and the remarkable description of the characters. The range of accents and voice inflections by Mark Meadows really enhanced the tale. However the landscape of that part of the world did not entice me to want to live there.

Spectacular

Both the story and the narrator are amazing! The talent of the writer at putting together such a complex tale!!! Amazing. It’s a historical, frontier novel that contains mystery, murder, magic, theft, impersonation, trickery, multiple languages, racism, honesty, and love all on one. The narrator is so talented with doing different characters and voices. Even though there are so many characters, you can instantly know which is speaking. Truly incredible and highly recommended!

Intricate clockwork mechanism

The author very successfully evokes the world of the late 19th century New Zealand gold camps. The characters seem to be part part a vast web of destiny. The past and past relationships are never over and done with, and consequences keep intruding as folks struggle to forge new identities and build wealth in the boom camps.
The underlying mystery is quite complex, and at the end of the day not wholly explained . Hugely atmospheric and entertaining, but I agree with those who found it difficult to care much about the characters.

Great narration

I give tremendous kudos to the narrator. He differentiated so many characters with his voice and did Scottish and Irish accents so well. I didn’t cringe a bit at his accents. I will say the women’s voices, Lydia’s in particular, we’re a bit off for women, but not the cheap and annoying falsetto that is so common when men are narrating women’s voices.

I was hooked from the onset and couldn’t wait for more secrets to be revealed. Highly recommend!

Don't Let The Astrology Dissuade You

I was a bit worried when I began this book that the astrology content would be (for me) boring, obtuse, and distracting. In fact, there is really nothing of it on the surface of the story. Rather, this is a book full of enjoyable characters and a lot of mystery. Some of the narrative jumping around in time gets a bit hard to follow at parts, at least while listening rather than following on a printed page. However, with so many characters and so much going on it is pretty remarkable how easy most of the story is to follow. Overall, it feels like the great novels of the 19th century with better pacing. My book group and I loved it to the point that we (for the first time) decided to follow this book immediately with another by the same author.

An Astrological Wonder

I have to say that this book was extraordinarily clever. You would probably have to read it more than once to really appreciate the extent of the acumen that was needed to write it. The ability to combine astrology with a unique place and time (1860's Gold Rush in New Zealand) signals a very talented writer. The swirling of characters as they mirror the night sky made for a great tale, and yet there was something lacking. The attention was placed so much on the "mechanics" of it all that it lacked emotion. And, real attachment to any one character was just not possible. In the end, all the players were just living descriptors of the signs and planets, seemingly lacking any soul...which is why any good astrologer knows that a chart is nothing without the influence of spirit.