Eleanor Catton Discusses "The Luminaries" Eleanor Catton was all but swallowed up the other day by the buzz and hum of a Midtown hotel lobby, with its chattering tourists. In the midst of a victory tour after winning the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her second novel, "The Luminaries," Ms. Catton had not yet fully adjusted to being an object of attention, or even to being allowed to stay in a fancy hotel, as she described it. "Do you think they'd bring us coffee upstairs?" she said. They would. Ms. Catton, who has long hair, a thick New Zealand accent that renders "went" as "wint," and a manner that is both forthright and whimsical, is something of a literary curiosity. At 28, she is the youngest person, and only the second from New Zealand, to win the prize: the starriest fiction award going, bringing a check for £50,000 (roughly $80,000) and incalculable benefits in sales and exposure. The other New Zealander to win was Keri Hulme, for "The Bone People," in 1985 - which happens to be the year Ms. Catton was born. Ms. Catton's winning novel is an unfashionably ambitious 834-page behemoth of a book that is both a murder mystery written in the Victorian style of Dickens or Wilkie Collins, and a virtuoso exercise organized - excitingly or irritatingly, depending on your perspective - according to the astrological signs of its characters and the position and movements of the planets above 19th-century New Zealand. Set in the gold rush town of Hokitika, the book begins on a stormy night when a seasick, spooked traveler stumbles upon a secret meeting of 12 uneasy men. There are multiple mysteries afoot - a rich man has disappeared; a prostitute has been found near death in the street; and a supposedly penniless hermit who turns out to have been very rich has died suspiciously - and each of the 12 is implicated in one way or another. Told in overlapping, "Rashoman"-like narratives, the rest of the book concerns itself with how, and why. The Man Booker judges called "The Luminaries" "extraordinary, luminous, vast," and many reviewers have been thoroughly dazzled by it, including the author Bill Roorbach, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Ms. Catton had created "something utterly new." But there have been dissenters. "A ship made of matchsticks in a bottle is a feat of construction but not necessarily a great work of art," David Sexton said in The London Evening Standard. Ms. Catton said that such talk does not really bother her. In her hotel room - the publisher had put her in a suite, another exciting development - she described how the book came about. It began, on one level, with the stars: She wanted her characters to correspond to the signs of the zodiac, and wanted the book to begin on Jan. 27, 1866: a day when, she discovered, there was a triple convergence in the heavens, three planets in Sagittarius. On another level, she began with plot: She wanted a big, meaty mystery. The book jumps around chronologically. It begins with a chapter that is 360 pages long and ends with one that lasts for barely two. Characters come and go according to planetary movements. The one representing Mercury sets, as it were, somewhere in the middle of the book and is never heard from again. Readers get the sense of being expertly led around by someone much cleverer than they are. Ms. Catton said that she herself does not believe that zodiac signs dictate people's characters, but just wanted to play with the idea while working hard to ensure that structure did not trump plot. "If the characters are emerging out of the book seeming like puppets or exercises in what is essentially a fictional conceit rather than a human conceit, then the whole book will fail," she said. On the surface, at least, "The Luminaries" is a far cry from her first book, "The Rehearsal." Published in the United States when she was 24, that novel was a postmodern romp about a theater company's dramatization of a high school sex scandal that featured shifting perspectives and characters who shimmered in and out of identities and roles.