Haunted by Erewhon

Part revisionist biography, part literary detective story, this book restores Butler to his rightful place as an early New Zealand writer of global importance. It is an original, passionate and engrossing 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.

Haunted by Erewhon is a revelatory reimagining of the life of Samuel Butler — radical thinker, satirist, explorer and author of Erewhon, arguably the first great New Zealand book.

Drawing on fifty years of research in archives and on the ground from Canterbury to Cambridge, and extensively on Butler’s own words, Roger Robinson reconstructs the missing story of Butler’s time in New Zealand. The coherent and confessional first-person narrative brings to life the four formative years that shaped Butler’s mind, his art, and his prescient vision of the modern world.