The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

I want to say so much about this book; there are so many pages I've turned over at the bottom (my way of remembering a quote) it's verging on the ridiculous. I don't like writing long reviews though so the chances are that I will say very little of what I actually have to say about The Rehearsal here and leave you to discover the rest for yourselves.

I put this book on my wishlist because I wanted to read some Eleanor Catton and was scared of the size of The Luminaries so I used The Rehearsal to test the waters, so to speak, and they passed the test with flying colours.

I can't really give you a synopsis of the book but the general idea is that there is a play based around events which have actually happened and both the story of the play and the actual events are told through the novel. Really The Rehearsal is about (at least in my reading of it) the nature of reality and whether something can become a fact just by a person believing it enough. It's about what people say and what's true and whether what people say can ever be true. It blurs the lines between pretty much everything and maybe it's just me but I found it difficult to get everything straight in my head until the end. I mean this in the best possible way - the story was so intriguing and thought provoking and well told that it was difficult to know what was the play and what was reality. Basically this book is just incredible. The writing is fantastic and the plot is so well thought out and just read it. I'm going to go see if the library has The Luminaries now because I need more. Such a fantastic writer.