The Luminaries

Reviews

Suyog Garg

Not only have these people the names of celestial objects, but they also act and interact in accordance with the nature of zodiacs they have been given. It is the first part that appears to be running with a slow pace and in which the main storyline and the characters are developed. I just love it.

siddhartha

The use of Neo-Victorian English gives life to the story and makes one to delve into it. The Best Book In The world. Deserved winner .

Highly recommended and supremely enjoyed, a beauty to behold. 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 . 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.

Since the time of the tale is the Victorian Era and since the town is also a colony of the British Empire; the use of this language makes for a golden match. The characters are well developed , took a lot of time to get into the story with so many characters involved , but , once it paced up , there's no turning back from this one . It truly is. To investigate these profoundly luring scenarios; 12 men, with such a myriad collection of origins and cultures (there’s also a vista of different languages of these people, but English been their lingua franca, is used in almost all of the conversations) that the reader is sure to be curious; assemble in the crown hotel, who are, to their dismay, interjected by a stranger who has arrived in the town that very morning.

Needless to say, the first thing that a reader catches in the book is the language. The situations and the surroundings are very well described and almost all of the township’s architecture and planning is evident by the wordings. They are prompted to share their stories, which are, as it turns out, so much tangled into each other that it is not until the very end that the whole picture comes into the light.

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 map of 1866 Hokitika drawn by me has been enclosed) 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. This is feast for the one trying to get a book which is a both a mystery & a history, a tangled up mess of numerous accounts on the outside and yet a mesmerizing clear stream of water from the inside; an interwoven tale of murder, addiction, revenge on one hand and love, treasure, ambition on the other.