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. *** 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. The stark, breathtaking backdrop of these Southern Alps later inspired his utopian satire Erewhon, and today serves as a stunning cinematic landscape for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.