New Zealand will be the first country in the world to publish the most anticipated novel of 2023 – Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – on 9 February. Birnam Wood is a gripping thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, a novel of epic scope and imagination that catapulted the Aotearoa writer to global stardom, selling 1.5 million copies worldwide, publishing in 32 languages. 

Hotly contested at auction, Birnam Wood will publish one month after New Zealand by Granta (UK, Australia); Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA); and McLelland&Stewart (Canada).

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?

‘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

Birnam Wood is an accessible mass-market thriller. It is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions and consequences; an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Birnam wood is, above everything, a brilliant, entertaining and gripping read.

Praise for Birnam Wood

‘Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it’s as good as it gets. A beautifully textured work – what a treat.’ – Stephen King

‘What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this.’ – Francis Spufford

‘Birnam Wood is electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller. It has an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill, and formidable love. It’s literally, physically breathtaking.’ – Katherine Rundell

‘A filmic and page-turning thriller – Eleanor Catton weaves a complex and absorbing web of human relationships in which the balance of power is constantly and unpredictably shifting. Hubris and ambition, vanity and greed, principle and expediency, courage and hope – all are here, but not necessarily where you expect to find them.’ – Carys Davies

‘This is an urgent, compelling read, bleak but deeply moving and humanly credible.  Eleanor Catton offers an unsparing analysis of the various deadly self-delusions and corruptions that are generated by our global denial of the planet’s crisis – but also by our naive, confused yearnings to be numbered among the righteous. It is a book of real moral depth.’ – Rowan Williams ‘I read this in two deep gulps – it’s delicious, it had me re-reading passages aloud. Catton’s storytelling is deft and irresistible in this merciless whirlpool of a book, which pulls you inexorably towards its final tragedy.’ – Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton | Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press | 9 February 2023 | $50 (hardback), $38 (paperback)

Interviews with Eleanor Catton are limited. To request a review copy of Birnam Wood, please contact: Penny Hartill – director hPR 021 721 424, penny@hartillpr.co.nz

Eleanor Catton will return to New Zealand for events in May.