Psychological thriller by Eleanor Catton to Granta

Eleanor Catton is staying with Granta for the follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel The Luminaries, which is to be a psychological thriller titled Birnham Wood.

Editorial director Max Porter acquired UK and Australian rights to Birnam Wood from Caroline Dawnay at United Agents LLP.

Birnham Wood is set in a remote area of New Zealand where scores of ultra-rich foreigners are building fortress-like homes and stockpiling weapons in preparation for a coming global catastrophe. The novel follows the guerrilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a ragtag group of quarrelling leftists who move about the country cultivating other people's land. Their chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions, ultimately, how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival--and at what cost.

New Zealand rights have been sold to Fergus Barrowman at Victoria University Press, Canadian rights to Jared Bland at McClelland & Stewart and US rights to Jonathan Galassi and Jenna Johnson at FSG. Translation rights are being handled by Margaret Halton at United Agents.

The novel was sold on outline and will be delivered at the end of 2017, with a proposed length of 80-100,000 words.The Luminaries topped 265,000.

Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, among others. In 2010 she was awarded the New Zealand Arts Foundation New Generation Award. Eleanor's second novel The Luminaries was the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award.