The Luminaries

Reviews

Suyog Garg

This literally is a feat seldom witnessed in any historical fiction. Eleanor cutton is a master storyteller .

siddhartha

Needless to say, the first thing that a reader catches in the book is the language. A point worth mentioning here is that the principle story follows a period of about four months (from 27th January to 27th April of the 66th year of 19th century), which are comprised in the first 3 and a half parts and the other 8 and a half parts take us a year before and tell the story from then. The author, Miss Eleanor Catton, details the characters and the backgrounds quiet vividly.

The use of Neo-Victorian English gives life to the story and makes one to delve into it. The situations and the surroundings are very well described and almost all of the township’s architecture and planning is evident by the wordings.

After the meeting at the Crown, the tale starts to take a pace and many of the mysteries of the first part are solved in the coming parts. A fortune is rediscovered and by the time the story winds up, the main villain has been executed and the stranger has taken his step out, of a town still trying to engulf the recent proceedings. A withered old man is dead, a whore is found unconscious on the street, a young man has disappeared, all on a single day of 14th of January 1866; & in between these miss-happenings ventures the enigmatic tale of fortunes gained and lost.

The Best Book In The world. Its 12 individual chapters narrate the different stories of all of these men.

All of the 12 men who gather for the discussion in the first chapter, have been each assigned a zodiac sign & there’s another set of 6 characters who have been assigned six different planets. Was itching to add this book to my library for many years now।Finally।The best part of the book is the premise and the subjugation of the personalities in the story .