After her Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel The Luminaries turned Eleanor Catton into a reluctant literary celebrity, she found refuge from the ensuing media attention in a surprising place: gardening guides and plant encyclopedias. “They’re so grounding,” she says with a laugh, speaking from her home in Cambridge, England. “You know, the alphabet moves forward in a sequence. They’re factual, they’re not trying to sell you anything.” Author Eleanor Catton at her home in Cambridge, U.K.Betty Laura Zapata/The Globe and Mail The meditative pleasures of farming manuals sowed the seeds for her first new novel in a decade: Birnam Wood, a...