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Granta nets psychological thriller from Booker Prize winner Catton
Granta has netted Birnam Wood, a “gripping” literary thriller from 2013 Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton.
The publisher acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including Australia but excluding New Zealand and Canada, from Caroline Dawney at United Agents. Managing director and publishing director Bella Lacey will edit. Birnam Wood will be published on 2nd March 2023.
Publication will be supported by an “extensive” author tour, exclusive editions for Waterstones and signed first editions for independent bookshops. The editions published by FSG in the US, McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Te Herenga Waka University Press in New Zealand will all use cover artwork designed by Jon Gray.
“The book is a brilliant page-turning, rollercoaster ride and I hope the design captures some of that. I’m so grateful to be asked to work on this new book and can’t wait to see it out in the world,” commented Gray.
The synopsis reads: “A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizeable 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?”
Birnam Wood is a “compelling psychological thriller” and “Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character,” the publisher said.
Lacey said: "Everything she turns her hand to, Catton does with extraordinary skill – from her debut, The Rehearsal, about the dreamy complexity of teenage sexual angst, to the wildly ambitious historical masterpiece The Luminaries, which made her an international literary superstar. She has now created in Birnam Wood that rare thing: an unputdownable read which delves into some of the most urgent issues of the day. Readers have much to look forward to, and Granta could not be more excited to be publishing it.”
Catton added: “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.”
