Announcing The International Publication Of Birnam Wood By Eleanor Catton

Published in Aotearoa New Zealand on 9 February 2023 | Paperback $38 / Hardback $50

A gripping literary thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood will be published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in February 2023, and around the world in March 2023.

The editions published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, Granta in the UK, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and McClelland & Stewart in Canada will all use cover artwork designed by award-winning designer Jon Gray, and be accompanied by new photographs of Eleanor Catton by award-winning photographer Murdo MacLeod.

Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize–winning novel The Luminaries sold 1.5 million copies worldwide, including 140,000 in New Zealand, and was published in 32 languages.

Birnam Wood is on the move...

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in the South Island of New Zealand, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

‘I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next.’ Eleanor Catton 

‘Publishing Ellie’s novels has been a highlight of my life, and I can’t wait to share her new masterpiece with readers.’ Fergus Barrowman, Publisher, Te Herenga Waka University Press.

ELEANOR CATTON is the author of The Luminaries (2013), winner of the Booker Prize, the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal (2009), won the New Zealand Best First Book of Fiction Award and the Betty Trask Prize, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she lives in Britain.

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