REVIEWS
Follow-up to a masterpiece could have been a call to arms
here have been numerous points over the past 10 years where I have found myself gazing longingly out my window wondering when Eleanor Catton will return with a new novel. Her last book, 2013’s, came out of nowhere and steamrolled everyone. Published when Catton was just 28, this 800-page Victorian pastiche was a technical masterpiece and, for my money, the best Booker winner of the 2010s (sorry Dame Hilary). I suppose I cannot blame Catton is, I too would demand to take a decade off. But thankfully she has returned. And her new novel is nothing like you’ll expect it to be.
