Eleanor Catton Interviewed by Alex Preston

Booker-winning novelist Eleanor Catton introduces her new psychological thriller, Birnam Wood, an examination of the human impulse for survival.

Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening group founded by Mira Bunting. They plant crops on the side of roads, in forgotten parks and on neglected gardens. They have struggled to break even for years, but a natural disaster seems to have offered the opportunity of a large abandoned arable farm. However, an American billionaire is also interested in the land and has bought it for what he tells Mira is his ‘end-times bunker’. He lets the group work the land, but can they trust each other as their ideas and ideologies are tested?

Catton was born in Canada and raised in New Zealand. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, won the Adam Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters and a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Here she talks to award-winning novelist Alex Preston, author of In Love and War.