Has the world drifted further apart? For Eleanor Catton, that isn't so much a philosophical question as a physical one. When she and her husband were travelling from their now home in the UK back to Catton's home country of New Zealand at the end of 2022 for the first time since the start of the pandemic, they conferred. “We were like, I'm sure this is further away than it used to be,” she says. Though she admits that feeling could have been the result of the toddler sandwiched between them. Her wide, warm smile just about fills the screen as she speaks from her parents’ home in Christchurch, where the author and her husband have been holidaying over summer with their two-year-old daughter.
It was in Cambridge, England, “a world (Granta, $32.99), her first book since , the 2013 novel that would go on to win the Booker Prize and make her, then 28, the youngest winner in history. Because of New Zealand's closed borders at the time of writing her third novel, Catton, now 37, was thinking about a place she was unable to return to. “It certainly had a psychological effect on what I was writing,” she says. “Because I felt excluded. I mean, I was legally excluded from the country.” She believes the physical distance gave her a certain kind of “satirical freedom”, an ability to “be critical of the country” from afar. , which takes its name from the forest of Shakespeare's , follows a gang of quasianarchist vigilante farmers who encounter Robert Lemoine, an enigmatic billionaire, on a plot of rural farmland they intend to secretly cultivate. Lemoine, it turns out, has his own plans for the land, ostensibly involving a post-apocalyptic bunker – but he is willing to work with them. What follows is a game of cat and mouse where the players keep switching masks and donning each other's whiskers and tails; a maze of political and personal rivalries, all set against the backdrop of impending climate disaster.
