The Luminaries Themes

Pretty much everyone in Hokitika is an ex-pat, with the lion's share of the characters hailing originally from the British Isles or China (of course, Te Rau Tauwhare and Charles Frost are the two n...

Family is kind of a, er, touchy subject for a lot of our characters in The Luminaries. Sure, as we mentioned in "Foreignness," the goldfields present men with the opportunity to make a new family f...

The Luminaries has several intertwined mysteries, so lies and deceit are kind of its bread and butter. And thank goodness—if the characters weren't so lousy at telling the truth, the mysteries co...

According to Moody, class isn't really as important in a place like Hokitika as it might be, say, back in the British Isles. The fact is that even a person with extremely "low" birth like Crosbie W...

"Luck" and "Destiny" are, strangely enough, both pretty important concepts in The Luminaries that coexist more or less peacefully. On the one hand, the novel's cosmic architecture implies that the...

As we discussed with "Foreignness," some of the characters in The Luminaries tend to exoticize the non-English people or places. Harald Nilssen, for example, gets really excited thinking about the...

Secrecy and lying are big topics in The Luminaries, but truth also gets a lot of airtime and consideration—and there's a lot of philosophizing about what the whole notion of "truth" actually mean...

After greed, the desire for revenge is probably the largest motivator for Hokitika's residents in The Luminaries (if the characters in the novel are a representative sample of the population, that...