Media Reviews

The Guardian
Her second novel, a great doorstopper of a murder mystery set against the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s,, looks at first sight very different; but it carries forward both her epic ambition and commitment to the sensuous pleasures of reading. She does not make things easy for herself: she has organised her 800-page epic according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens, while each of the novel's 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle. But while she has set herself such arcane formal constraints, much of the novel's appeal lies in the fact that it is a compulsive thriller.

Daily Telegraph
Catton is completely in control of all the bustling, brawling plot lines of 'this very circular affair', as if they really were determined by the astrological patterns she playfully invokes. Just as one character bursts out laughing in appreciation when he realises a villain has signed a deed with an ambiguous signature, the reader feels similar flashes of pleasure in the author’s forethought.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With a knack for conveying robust detail in an economy of straightforward language, Catton untangles a dazzling knot of interwoven lives...

Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. There's a lovely payoff after the miles of twists and turns. It's work getting there but work of a thoroughly pleasant kind.

 Peter Hobbs, author of In the Orchard, the Swallows
Sometimes – rarely – a novel arrives that is so good all you can do is shake your head in wonder. Brilliant in design, masterful in execution, and intensely pleasurable to inhabit, The Luminaries is a masterpiece, the work of a writer of apparently limitless range and talent.

 Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
All really good books shatter their generic origins, becoming a thing unto themselves. But rarely has this axiom held more firmly than in Eleanor Catton's thrilling – in every sense – second novel. The sheer weight of the narrative might seem daunting; but dismiss that. She is among the finest of storytellers, drawing us forward through a labyrinth of lives, all of them converging in ways you could never easily imagine. I didn't want this novel to end.

Reader Reviews

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