And the winner is Eleanor Catton with The Luminaries. The youngest Man Booker winner in the prize’s history (she is 28 but completed The Luminaries aged 27) has triumphed with the longest ever Man Booker winning novel (832 pages). Catton is just the second New Zealander to win the prize, the first being Keri Hulme with The Bone People in 1985. A more important statistic is that earlier in the year there were an extraordinary 151 novelists submitted for the prize and from this reach field of literary wheat hers is the one head that remains standing, waving in the warm breeze of the judges’ favour. Life for Eleanor Catton will never be the same again. For more details go to www.themanbookerprize.com
About the book: It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of
twelve 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….