The Luminaries First Edition Eleanor Catton by Eleanor Catton 9781847084316, 1847084311 instant download after payment.

Eleanor Catton’s fiendishly clever novel. Both ghost story and gripping mystery, it richly evokes a mid-19th century world of gold rush boom and bust.

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 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.

"It’s not even a novel in the normal sense, but rather a mass confabulation that evaporates in front of us, an astrological divination waning like the moon, the first section 360 pages long (or are those degrees?), the last a mere sliver. But it’s a sliver that delivers … A score of major characters take turns as protagonists. They headline in set pieces and protracted scenes, suffer shootings and poisonings, enact strategic whoring, survive storms at sea, find treasure sewn in dresses, lose the treasure, find it again … The Luminaries is a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new."  -  Bill Roorbach, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Eleanor Catton studied English at the University of Canterbury and completed a Master's in Creative Writing at The Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote her first novel, The Rehearsal, as her master's thesis. Eleanor Catton holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she also held an adjunct professorship and an MA in fiction from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.