Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and set during the heady days of New Zealand’s Gold Rush, The Luminaries is a magnificent novel of love, lust, murder, and greed, in which three unsolved crimes link the fates and fortunes of twelve men. Dickens meets Deadwood in this internationally celebrated phenomenon.
In January 1866, young Walter Moody lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the west coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind a family scandal. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investigate what links three crimes that occurred on a single day: the town's wealthiest man has vanished. An enormous fortune in pure gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. A prostitute has supposedly tried to end her life. But nothing is quite as it seems. As the men share their stories, what emerges is an intricate network of alliances and betrayals, secrets and lies, that is as exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
Part mystery, part fantastical love story, and full of diabolical twists and turns, The Luminaries is a richly imagined novel that brilliantly weaves together the changing fates and fortunes of an entire community, one where everyone has something to hide. Full of character and event, it is a gripping page-turner -- and a unique, atmospheric world – in which readers will gladly lose themselves.
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