What I’m Watching: “The Luminaries”

Recently, the world premiere of the TV adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, screened here in NZ.

I was very keen to see the six-part series for a number of reasons: the novel is written by a New Zealander and is also set in New Zealand; it won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2013; and the novel’s author, Eleanor Catton, wrote the screenplay, so I felt the dramatization should be true to to the essence of the novel, which—gulp, true confessions!—I haven’t yet read.

By way of a broad syn...