New Zealand author Eleanor Catton (28) has won the Man Booker Prize 2013
She is the youngest Man Booker winner in the prize's history, having completed the book at the age of 27.
The 832 page tome is the longest Man Booker prize winning book ever and Catton is just the second New Zealander to win the prize, the first being Keri Hulme with The Bone People in 1985.
Catton beat off 150 fellow competitors to take the €50,000 award.
Her win brings disappointment for Irish author Colm Toibín, who was nominated for his work The Testament of Mary. It was his third nomination.
Man Bookers says 'The Luminaries, set in 1866 during the New Zealand gold rush, contains a group of 12 men gathered for a meeting in a hotel and a traveller who stumbles into their midst; the story involves a missing rich man, a dead hermit, a huge sum in gold, and a beaten-up whore. There are sex and seances, opium and lawsuits in the mystery too. The multiple voices take turns to tell their own stories and gradually what happened in the small town of Hokitika on New Zealand's South Island is revealed.'
The chair of judges Robert Macfarlane described the book as a "dazzling work, luminous, vast”. It is, he said, “a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be 'a big baggy monster', but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery”. Each of its 12 chapters halves in length which gives the narrative a sense of acceleration. It is not, however, an extended exercise in literary form." Macfarlane and his fellow judges were impressed by Catton's technique but it was her 'extraordinarily gripping' narrative that enthralled them. 'We read it three times and each time we dug into it the yields were extraordinary, its dividends astronomical.' The Luminaries is, said Macfarlane, a novel with heart. 'The characters are in New Zealand to make and to gain – the one thing that disrupts them is love.'
And in case you were wondering, an orreryl is 'An orrery is a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System in a heliocentric model.'
