The Luminaries is good enough to win the international Man Booker Prize, but it is not the best book in New Zealand.
Eleanor Catton’s novel was trumped by the story of a Wellington art dealer at tonight’s New Zealand Post Book of the Year awards.
Peter McLeavey: The life and times of a New Zealand art dealer by Wellington author Jill Trevelyan took out the 2014 Book of the Year at the ceremony in Wellington.
The decision is a major shock and puts the judges at odds with book buyers.
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While Trevelyan’s book has not featured on the best sellers’ lists, The Luminaries held the No 1 spot on the NZ booksellers’ fiction list for 54 weeks before being knocked off its perch by Thom Conroy’s The Naturalist this week.
The Luminaries has sold more than 560,000 print and digital copies worldwide, with 117,430 print and ebooks bought in New Zealand. Most NZ fiction print runs are around 1000 to 2000 books.
