It may be 2013, but the capacious 19th-century novel is alive and kicking. Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker-winning The Luminaries (Little, Brown, $27), with its homage to masters like Dickens and Wilkie Collins, its elaborate weave of literary artifice, and its ingenious lunar and astrological structure—as if Catton is casting a star chart for this narrative as much as inventing a story in which fortune plays a leading role—is also a self-consciously post-modern literary work, though one infused with the ebullience of a storyteller rather than the arch irony of an experimental writer. Set in the New Zealand gold rush town of Hokitika in 1866, this is the kind of rangy page-turner you can dive into and stay submerged in for hours and hundreds of pages at a stretch. The landscape is vivid, the language rich, the voices earthy and theatrical, and the plot is an endlessly unfolding fabric of tales, confessions, dreams, lies, mysteries, and more. With its hermits and whores, preachers and politicians, Maoris and miners, this novel truly is, as the Man Booker judges said, a “dazzling work, luminous, vast.”