The Luminaries

(Eleanor Catton)

The 2013 Man Booker Prize judges must have super-sensitive metal detectors, for they found gold in this boring, pointlessly complicated novel.  After working through the dross, slag and tailings for only a short time I lost interest in magic bullets, missing crates, who had seen whom when and where and I had no idea anymore why it mattered.  Snore. I still might have given this sometimes evocative book an additional star…but then I got to the appalling, awful courtroom scenes.  Grrr.