Haunted by Erewhon

Samuel Butler, born in England, lived in Canterbury, New Zealand, from 1860 to 1864. He became a notable explorer and successful sheep farmer in a part of the Southern Alps now renowned for its use in the Lord of the Rings. His satiric fiction Erewhon and his autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh are classics of literature in English, included in many lists of great books.

Samuel Butler — radical thinker, explorer, satirist — wrote Erewhon, the first great New Zealand book. Drawing on research and on Butler’s own words, Roger Robinson reconstructs the missing story of Butler’s time in New Zealand; the formative years that shaped his mind, his art, and his vision of the modern world.

In this bold ‘co-authored autobiography’, Butler speaks again in his own vivid, witty and subversive voice. We see him as settler and sheep-farmer, mountaineer and journalist, philosopher and lover, wrestling with Darwin’s ideas, with faith and doubt, and with the haunting beauty of South Canterbury.

Haunted by Erewhon restores Butler to his rightful place as a New Zealand writer of global importance. It is an inventive, passionate work of scholarship and imagination — the untold story of how a young emigrant in the 1860s created one of the world’s most visionary books.