The Luminaries
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The Luminaries
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Narrated by:
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Mark Meadows
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By:
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Eleanor Catton
About this listen
Longlisted – Baileys Women’s Prize 2014
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2013
Canadian Governor General's Literary Award, 2013.
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 whore 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.
The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th-century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will confirm for critics and listeners that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.
Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study for a year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in the US and went on to hold a position as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing there, teaching Creative Writing and Popular Culture. Eleanor won a 2010 New Generation Award. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
©2013 Eleanor Catton (P)2013 Audible LtdCritic Reviews
"The Luminaries is an impressive novel, captivating, intense and full of surprises." (Times Literary Supplement)
"The Luminaries is a breathtakingly ambitious 800-page mystery with a plot as complex and a cast as motley as any 19th-century doorstopper. That Catton's absorbing, hugely elaborate novel is at its heart so simple is a great part of its charm. Catton's playful and increasingly virtuosic denouement arrives at a conclusion that is as beautiful as it is triumphant." (Daily Mail)
"It is awesomely - even bewilderingly - intricate. There's an immaculate finish to Catton's prose, which is no mean feat in a novel that lives or dies by its handling of period dialogue. It's more than 800 pages long but the reward for your stamina is a double-dealing world of skullduggery traced in rare complexity. Those Booker judges will have wrists of steel if it makes the shortlist, as it fully deserves." (Evening Standard)
What listeners say about The Luminaries
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Libby
- 09-07-2014
Excellence in prose and presentation
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Wow! An excellent narration of an outstanding literary work. I can highly recommend this audio book and I thank Mark Meadows for his brilliant rendition of such an intensely imaginative story, with such a wonderful array of accents, cultures, and genders. 10 out of 10.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Yvonne Colledge
- 09-04-2015
thoroughly enjoyed the story listened to it twice.
thoroughly enjoyed the story. I listened to it twice while working. highly recommend this book.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- wendy
- 08-10-2014
Engaging Story
Where does The Luminaries rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
In the high end, it was a clever series of believable coincidences and intertwining lives and people with depth and foibles, seen from many angles. You need to pay attention to remember who knows who and how.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lee Marshall
- 01-11-2020
Beautifully told
A story that really demands your attention, and at the end so much left only to the imagination. I enjoyed the ability of the author to create such vivid pictures of the character personalities with so few words and only oblique descriptions.
The reading was just excellent. As a NZer the poorly pronounced Maori and bad accent for Tauwhare were irksome, but overall the reader’s variety of accents for some 15+ characters was just amazing. A great book and reading. Really enjoyed.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Melissa Solomon
- 25-08-2016
An interesting experience
Whilst this book is beautifully written and the narration was well done it's definitely not a book I'd read or listen to again. Even with the chapter summaries it was hard to keep track of time, place and characters and I found the ending rather anticlimactic.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Amanda Vermeulen
- 29-01-2016
Better suited to print
Any additional comments?
This is a very complex and detailed book, written beautifully, but given that few people have long uninterrupted periods of time for listening, hard to keep up with the audio. As much as I enjoyed the way Catton crafted this novel, I found it very slow and I lost interest. I did not finish the book.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Melanie
- 05-05-2015
Extraordinary!
This story is amazing and the narrator was incredible. What an epic listen. This took me weeks to get through, but I highly recommend it!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Nola J Pearce
- 07-09-2017
If you love the English language, read this.
I loved this book. A brilliant story, beautifully written (hence a worthy winner of the. Poker prize 2013), with so many delicious turns of very British phrase that i wanted to write them all down and adopt them one by one. A spectacular narrator really made the experience perfect.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 06-09-2018
Engaging and absorbing. I miss it!
This engrossing story became a wonderful companion over the last fortnight. I will now go read the book itself, too. Mainly to give my own voice to the characters, to be able to take time to analyse any significance of the title headings, and fill in any gaps that I might have missed. It’s a fascinating time period. An excellent performance by the reader (except for a few mispronounced common Maori /NZ words) quite an exceptional undertaking- 30hours! There should be a “making of The Luminaries” audible, behind the scenes. I’m very keen to go visit Hokitika again- with new eyes this time.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Shalleycat
- 16-02-2024
Fabulous Historical Murder (?) Mystery
Loved this book. Great narration of racist, selfish, foolish dark side if man, and woman, set on the beautiful West Coast.
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