Review of "The Luminaries" by Eleanor Catton

I just loved reading this book. I was led to it by the BBC TV series, which I enjoyed - but the book is so much better. The TV series was quite a free adaptation, and doesn't stay true to the narrative of the book - unsurprisingly it telescopes the plot, gets rid of some complexity and characters, and so on. Curiously it makes much more of the astrological affinity between Emory Staines and Anna Wetherell - that barely gets a mention in the book, even though it does do some of the heavy plot explication. 

The last part seemed a bit disappointing, almost as if the author thought it had gone on long enough and needed to be finished - which it does in a series of very small vignette-like chapters, all of which are set in the period before the main narrative. But I still loved it sufficiently for that not to matter.