The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.

So Luminaries remains maybe the most beloved thing we've ever read at NUBClub. It's a long and complicated book, and there was a lot of time spent just clarifying how the plot came together. Essentially, Catton is weaving 12 characters around a zodiac metaphor that all come together to allow two young and mystically connected lovers to unite. The language is just breathtaking, and Catton does a wonderful job of exploring the New Zealand setting, ranging her story from Moari trader to Chinese merchants to English intellectuals. There is just so much care in the settings and the different perspectives of her characters that everyone feels rich and developed. And the love story is just incredible. The weaving path that Emery and Ana take to find each other and understand their feelings is like nothing we've ever read. There's just so much in this novel to unpack and so many wonderful moments to discover that there's no way to get into them all here. We know it's long. We know it's complicated. Read over the other reviews to see how rarely we are some universally enthusiastic about a book. It's brilliant. Read it.