Oprah Daily Reveals the Cover of Eleanor Catton’s “Birnam Wood”
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In 2013, Eleanor Catton shattered a glass ceiling when, at the age of twenty-eight, she became the youngest winner of the Booker Prize, arguably the Anglophone world’s most prestigious literary accolade. Intricate and layered, The Luminaries tracks the fate of a mid-19th century prospector on New Zealand’s South Island as he navigates a maze of bizarre mysteries. (Born in Canada, Catton was raised in Christchurch and now lives in Britain.) Now, an Oprah Daily exclusive reveals the cover for her new novel, Birnam Wood, a decade in the making, out from FSG on March 7, 2023.
The cover is as austere as the Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth, alluding to the famous lines from a specter conjured by one of the Witches: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him. (Catton quotes these lines as her epigraph.) The composition is rendered in a stark black-and-white palette, bisected by a curved line, with minimal graphic elements: a scrub of firs, an amphibious plane flying out of view. “The book is a brilliant page-turning, rollercoaster ride and I hope the design captures some of that,” designer Jon Gray notes. “I’m so grateful to be asked to work on this new book and can’t wait to see it out in the world.”
Mostly set in a remote, picture-postcard New Zealand town, Birnam Wood moves with grace, building suspense and dread. Catton pits two young women and their maverick environmental organization against a duplicitous American billionaire with more than money on his mind. A weird landslide buries five people; Mira and Shelley plant gardens illegally; the billionaire circulates among the rich and powerful, a charming chameleon—toil and trouble bubble throughout Birnam Wood.
Catton skewers the mores and platitudes of our era. "I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic,” she says. “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."
Rendered in a taut, immersive prose, Birnam Wood unveils a new phase of climate fiction, cementing Catton’s reputation as one of her generation’s most piercing and prodigious writers.
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