The Luminaries
Hardcover edition
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| Author | Eleanor Catton |
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| Country | New Zealand |
| Language | English |
| Series | Man Booker Prize |
| Published | 2013 Victoria University Press (New Zealand), Granta Books (UK), Little, Brown and Company (North America) |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 848 pp. |
| Awards | 2013 Man Booker Prize |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 851827301 |
The Luminaries is the second novel by Eleanor Catton, published by Victoria University Press in August 2013 and Granta on 5 September 2013. On 15 October it was announced as the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It is the longest book (at 832 pages), and Catton the youngest author (at age 28), ever to win the award.
Catton described the novel as "a kind of weird sci-fi fantasy thing."
The plot follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the fledgling West Coast of the South Island settlement of Hokitika, near New Zealand's goldfields in 1866 to try to make his fortune. Instead he stumbles into a tense meeting between twelve local men, who draw him in to the complex mystery behind a series of unsolved crimes.
Each of the twelve men who comprise the council in the first chapter of the book is associated with one of the twelve zodiac signs. The title of a chapter in which one of these men plays a major role is likely to contain that man's sign. The associations are as follows:
The conventional characteristics associated with each sign serve as a skeleton upon which Catton builds to create fully fledged characters. Te Rau Tauwhare is the only name on the list based on a real person; all others are fictional.
Another set of characters is associated with heavenly bodies within the solar system.
Aged 14, Catton and her father went on a tandem trip from their home in Christchurch over Arthur's Pass to the West Coast. This inspired her interest in the 1860s West Coast Gold Rush, and she started thinking about a story. She spent much time in Hokitika while writing the book many years later.
Catton returned to Hokitika in March 2014 for the first time since December 2012. She gave a question and answer session at the Regent Theatre with her British publisher, Max Porter, in front of a sell-out crowd. She revealed that she had used the Papers Past website of the National Library of New Zealand to find suitable names for her characters. With Balfour an unusual name during the time of the gold rush, it is assumed that Catton adopted the surname of the marine engineer James Balfour who did an assessment of the possibility for a port in Hokitika during the gold rush.
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