
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.
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Critic 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)
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In a London Pub called The Coach and Horses, four men gather. Three of them have been friends for half a lifetime, having fought in the same war, drunk in the same pubs, and bet on the same horses. Now they have come together to deliver the ashes of a fifth man, Jack Dodds, to the sea. Their journey, which will take them deep into their collective and individual pasts, lies at the center of an astonishingly moving novel of friendship, memory, and fate.
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Don't hesitate
- By Robert on 03-23-06
By: Graham Swift
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The Whale Rider
- By: Witi Ihimaera
- Narrated by: Jay Laga'aia
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The classic book that inspired the award-winning, internationally released film Whale Rider, winner of Best Film at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and 2004 Academy Awards Best Actress nomination for Keisha Castle-Hughes. Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he's focused in his duties as Chief, in a tribe that claims decent from the legendary "whale rider".
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Kahu, her great-grandfather, and the whale rider
- By Will on 07-12-05
By: Witi Ihimaera
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The White Tiger
- A Novel
- By: Aravind Adiga
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life - having nothing but his own wits to help him along. Through Balram's eyes, we see India as we've never seen it before: the cockroaches and the call centers, the prostitutes and the worshippers, the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger.
With a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create morality and money doesn't solve every problem.
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Entertaining, thought-provoking, darkly funny
- By Mark P. Furlong on 05-29-08
By: Aravind Adiga
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The Nix
- A Novel
- By: Nathan Hill
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 21 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn’t seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart.
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Is There An Editor In The House??
- By Sara on 11-03-16
By: Nathan Hill
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The God of Small Things
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family.
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Worthy Booker winner!
- By Saman on 08-10-17
By: Arundhati Roy
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Ducks, Newburyport
- By: Lucy Ellmann
- Narrated by: Stephanie Ellyne
- Length: 45 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, open carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate? When are you allowed to start swearing?
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Stephanie Ellyne really brings the book to life
- By Shashank on 02-27-20
By: Lucy Ellmann
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The Lola Quartet
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: Sarah Scott
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Gavin Sasaki was a promising young journalist in New York City until the day he was fired for plagiarism. The last thing he wants is to sell foreclosed real estate for his sister Eilo's company in their Florida hometown, but he's in no position to refuse her job offer. Plus, there's another reason to go home: Eilo recently met a 10-year-old girl who looks very much like Gavin and has the same last name as his high-school girlfriend, Anna, who left town abruptly after graduation.
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wanted a longer commute so i could hear more!
- By Jasmine Rotkopf on 03-10-18
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True History of the Kelly Gang
- By: Peter Carey
- Narrated by: Gianfranco Negroponte
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Ned Kelly's name resonates in Australia the same way the name Jesse James does in America. Was he a crusading folk hero or murderous horse thief and bank robber? Who was the real Ned Kelly? As the impoverished son of an Irish convict, Kelly was cheated, lied to, and abused by the English. Committed to fighting back against oppression, Kelly and his gang of outlaws eluded police for nearly two years.
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An 'adjectival' masterpiece of 'effing' prose.
- By Darwin8u on 05-21-12
By: Peter Carey
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In Sunlight and in Shadow
- By: Mark Helprin
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 29 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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New York in 1947 glows with postwar energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, returns home to run the family business. In a single, magical encounter on the Staten Island ferry, the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale falls for him instantly but too late to prevent her engagement to a much older man. Harry and Catherine pursue one another in a romance played out in postwar America’s Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, and the haunts of gangsters.
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Great Insomnia Listening
- By Leslie on 10-10-12
By: Mark Helprin
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Little, Big
- or, The Fairies' Parliament
- By: John Crowley
- Narrated by: John Crowley
- Length: 24 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Edgewood - which is not found on any map - is many houses, all put inside each other or across each other. It’s filled with and surrounded by mystery and enchantment; the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Smoky Barnable, who has fallen in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, travels from the City on foot to Edgewood, her family home. There he finds himself on the magical border of an otherworld.
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The Farther in You Go, the Bigger it Gets
- By Jefferson on 04-19-12
By: John Crowley
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The Penguin History of New Zealand
- By: Michael King
- Narrated by: Rosemary Ronald
- Length: 17 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed, the movements and conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth.
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Simply Excellent
- By Malissa Webster on 02-28-23
By: Michael King
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The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
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Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: David Atlas
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever. A savagely beautiful novel about the many forms of good and evil, of truth and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
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The vanity and stupidity of the author
- By Off The Grid on 01-12-24
By: Richard Flanagan
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
What listeners say about The Luminaries
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mel
- 11-10-13
Not So Luminous
I usually give in to the award winners, more out of a skeptical curiosity than the belief in some arbitrary group's promise that this will be *the best book I've read since...* I enjoy the mental argument that *they* got it wrong, as much as the agreement that *they* got it right, either way counting on being stirred enough by the read to have the passion for a discussion. In the case of the Luminaries, I get neither satisfaction. The only other short-listed Man Booker I've read this year is Harvest by Jim Crace -- it lost, and was about equally entertaining (as was Transatlantic, from the longlist). The word, I swore I'd never use in a review comes to mind -- meh (less a word than onomatopoeia) such a cop out, but the listen left me exhausted for the reasons I'll explain.
This is not a complaint, or to say I did not like the book. It is captivating and elaborately constructed with a great sense of place and time. The period details are transportive, in the beginning feeling much like a good Dickens pastiche. The characters, as many as there are months of the year, are each an astrological sign, or house, and the characteristics assigned to those distinctions, which she uses to prefix each chapter, as well as explain whom is in whose house, etc. Catton also enjoys some word-play in this complex production of writing and architecture -- writing each chapter with exactly half the words as the preceding chapter. All these pieces of construction are exceptionally ambitious and creative, but can be confusing and mentally labor intensive. (There is no explanation given in the audible version; I came to these realizations after banging my head against the wall for a couple of days, and relentlessly texting Darwin on the matter.)
Catton has definitely written an interesting novel, and written, and written, and belabored the plot until I just lost interest and wanted to move forward to a finish instead of reviewing, again, the events as told by each of the 12 characters involved. I would go into synopsis of the book, but then you'd have to hear the same plot from THIRTEEN points of view, instead of a mere TWELVE. Sophisticated intelligence, beautiful prose, and intricate plotting, become less so when redundant and complicated.
(A big) -- However... a friend tells me this is a book I would absolutely love if I read the book, which contains charts, graphs, and a very important list of characters, all adding clarity and an ease to the read, as well as beautifully tying in the astrological twist. For clarification, I did not like the book as I experienced it audibly, but I did recognize the talent and creativity enough to consider picking up the book and giving it another chance. It's is going to take me a while before I'm ready to tackle all 30 hours of this again. A consideration for those still undecided. Hopefully, a little understanding before going in will be helpful.
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160 people found this helpful
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- january
- 01-23-14
I almost let the reviews keep me from a good book
I don't buy into trends or hype. I don't want to read a book that everyone loved, because honestly, everyone's tastes aren't the same as mine. I like books that challenge, that awe and astound, that push me to think in a way I haven't before. I won't read a book just because it won an award.
That being said, after reading the synopsis of this book, I decided to read it anyway. It sounded new and different. But I was disheartened by all of the negative reviews. Again, I decided to read it anyway. And I'm glad I did.
The characters are rich and well developed. And although there are a lot of them, it's not difficult to keep them all straight because of their individuality.
Something that everyone is talking about is the astrological formula Ms. Catton used. While I agree that it does sound like a creative writing class prompt, I do not consider that a bad thing. What does it matter how you get there? It only matters that what you have when you get there is something you're proud of, and, hopefully, something that people want to read. I think she has been successful on both counts. To me, the astrological aspect didn't matter a great deal over all. That is to say, it neither added nor subtracted from the story.
I'm happy with the time I spent listening to this book. It allowed me to look at a time and place I generally would have to reason to consider.
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40 people found this helpful
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- Vicky
- 12-22-13
What a great, original book
What made the experience of listening to The Luminaries the most enjoyable?
I went into this book for the historical fiction and came out of it thinking, that of the thousands of books I've read, this was truly written in the most original way.
Any additional comments?
The authour, by tying the character sections into the state of the moon, writing shorter sections as the moon waned, kept things moving along. At the end, a flashback explains all.
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3 people found this helpful
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- SW Clemens
- 04-16-14
Brilliant Narration but Book Needs an Editor
Mark Meadows is amazing, voicing more than a dozen characters so distinctly that it was like listening to an ensemble cast. His accents run the gamut from Scottish, to Irish, the various regional and class distinctions of England, Maori, Australian, Chinese, men and women, young and old. I only kept listening because of the narrator.
The book is Dickensian in scope and 19th Century in narrative style, which befits the subject, but it needed a good editor. The writing is very good, but the story jumps around in time to no purpose, and is numbingly repetitive. The last quarter of the book does little more than show in action what we already know from hearsay and narration, and leaves a few loose ends that would have given a more satisfying resolution.
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- Carol Lemelin
- 11-23-13
Absorbing, Mystifying, Wonderful
Would you consider the audio edition of The Luminaries to be better than the print version?
I feel a little sorry for anyone who reads the print version because they would be deprived of the enjoyment of Mark Meadows brilliant work. So many varied characters and yet the listener knew exactly who was speaking every time.
In addition, the wonderful language of the book, a vocabulary from the past made one feel that book had been written in 1865! That may not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it enormously.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Emory Stains, even though he appeared late was refreshingly gentle and open. His appearance seemed to light up the place.
Which character – as performed by Mark Meadows – was your favorite?
That would be impossible to say. All interpretations were wonderful.
If you could take any character from The Luminaries out to dinner, who would it be and why?
Anna Weatheral because I would like to know more about life for women in that era.
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- Lindsay
- 09-06-15
brilliant!
loved this book! worth the time! everything is woven together perfectly from start to finish. intelligent prose, entertaining, fascinating human story.
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- serabear
- 10-14-16
ok
the story telling was fantastic!! the actual story was mediocre. I was expecting more from the ending and was a bit dissapointed.
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- Jane F. Clifton
- 07-20-14
Brilliant read, top story
Where does The Luminaries rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
One of the best audiobooks I've listened to.
What does Mark Meadows bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Mark Meadows managed the difficult task of so many characters and varied accents with consumate skill.
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- katrina
- 03-01-14
Wonerful narration
This is a beautiful, complex story. The narrator managed to keep it pacy and distinguished the characters brilliantly. I was engaged through all the twenty something hours of it, which is really quite a feat for a narrator.
The plot is so intricate, you'll want to concentrate to keep track of it, but it's so clever, I was amazed it was her first novel.
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- Georgia Burns
- 01-04-14
More suited to reading rather than listening
Any additional comments?
Mark Meadows did an admirable job of distinguishing between the many characters in The Luminaries with various accents and tones. Even the women came off well, each pleasingly voiced in their unique way. It is the story itself that kept my head spinning. Without the artifice of the astrological signs, longitudes, latitudes, etc. it is still quite a puzzle to solve. I needed a book in front of me for reference.
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