Author(s): Eleanor Catton

Crime and Thrillers

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Kirkus Prize, Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award

CBC Books' #1 Canadian Novel of the Year
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, the Globe and Mail, NPR, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, Kirkus Reviews, The Telegraph, Indigo, Apple iBooks Canada
A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is an electrifying eco-thriller grounded in a provocative and sly exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our times.

Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster has created an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.
     For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira, Birnam Wood's founder,  stumbles on an answer: occupying the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. The enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira and Birnam Wood, he makes them an offer that would set them up for the long term. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
    Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.