The New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton explains how her Booker prize-winning novel The Luminaries is bathed in starlight but driven by the iron exigencies of plot

Eleanor Catton's third novel, The Luminaries, catapulted her into the literary stratosphere when it won the 2013 Booker prize.

When she came to the Guardian book club, Catton explained how astrology adds another level to the novel and why she began her research by watching a simulation of the night skies above New Zealand from 1864 to 1868. She described the mysterious charts at the beginning of each chapter, and how The Luminaries takes liberties with history but not with astronomy.

But Catton's meticulous construction is, she said, a story of love and money – a story which attempts to combine the nuance and subtlety of literary fiction with the narrative drive of an adventure.

Reading list

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta)