New Zealand author Eleanor Catton's novel The Luminaries is one of six shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, with the winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on Wednesday morning (AEST time).
Catton's 823-page book has been described as a "Kiwi Twin Peaks" - an astrological mystery set in 1866 Hokitika. Here is the first chapter of the novel:
Chapter One: Mercury In Sagittarius
In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed.
The twelve men congregated in the smoking-room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met. For all their variety of comportment and dress - frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill - they might have been twelve strangers on a railway-car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway - deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.
Such was the perception of Mr Walter Moody, from where he stood in the doorway with his hand upon the frame. He was innocent of having disturbed any kind of private conference, for the speakers had ceased when they heard his tread in the passage; by the time he opened the door, each of the twelve men had resumed his occupation (rather haphazardly, on the part of the billiard-players, for they had forgotten their places) with such a careful show of absorption that no-one even glanced up when he stepped into the room.