It's hard to know where to start in discussing this book - it's SO big, SO ambitious and SO extraordinary that anything I say will just seem trivial and insignificant. The only answer is for EVERYONE to just read the damn thing! It's set in Hokitika in the 1860s, during the gold rush, and concerns a large group of inter-connected characters. There is a murder, a disappearance, opium addiction, stolen gold, corruption, and much, much more. Catton's research and evocation of local history is incredible, the detail of daily life, the food that was eaten, the clothing, the language, the banking and court systems, the transportation; everything is convincing. The blurb says: 'a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems.' Reading it I got echoes of The Name of the Rose, The Shadow of the Wind, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Cloud Atlas, Maurice Shadbolt's Season of the Jew...this book aims very, very high, and delivers. If it doesn't win major awards and receive huge international acclaim, I'll be very, very surprised. Yes, I liked it!