The Luminaries

Description

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.

Author description

Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, Eleanor Catton, 27, completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for her first novel, "The Rehearsal," which was also long-listed for the Orange Prize and short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop as the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship. She lives in New Zealand.