Wednesday, March 5, 2014

The Luminaries

The Luminaries / Eleanor Catton 834 pgs.

This sweeping work takes place in the 1860's in New Zealand which is experiencing a gold rush.  People are coming from all over to seek their fortune.  This book has A LOT of characters...20 are listed in the beginning of the book and it is, at times, hard to keep track of them all.  It is also a bit hard to sort out the good guys and bad guys.

The book hooks you from the very first chapter and does a good job of giving you enough information about most of the characters.  Walter Moody arrives in town and stumbles in on a meeting of twelve men discussing a series of unexplained events.  Throughout, we are given some information about each situation a little at a time.  Eventually all is revealed.

This book won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and is an interesting but overly long read.  A few less characters could have saved a few hundred pages.
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