The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-winning tale of a Victorian gold prospector who travels to New Zealand and stumbles into a complex mystery, has been named as the escabeche book group’s read for the Christmas holiday.
The escabeche book group will next meet on Monday January 13th 2014 at 7.30pm and discuss The Luminaries, recently described as a dazzling feat of a novel by The Observer.
The plot involves Walter Moody who finds himself in a room of 12 men who have a joint secret involving an opium den, a drugged whore, the ghostly ship, a dead drunk, a missing fortune and a young man’s disappearance. The book is organized according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens. Each of the novel’s 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle.
All readers are very welcome to join the group and share their thoughts in a relaxed, informal setting.
The escabeche book group meet every month at escabeche 1 and have swapped thoughts on 18 reads since July 2012.
In order of preference, the escabeche book club have previously read: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (73/100); A Spot of Bother by by Mark Haddon (69); Room by Emma Donoghue (67); The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (65); The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; Beauty by Rapael Seabourne (62); Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (62); Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (61); The Light Between Oceans (60); The 100 Year Old Man Who Jumped out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (58); Perfect by Rachel Joyce and The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing (55); Dark Winter by David Mark (52); Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (50); Idiopathy by Sam Byers (45) and The Shack by William P. Young (23).
