Birnam Wood
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, The Telegraph
A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick
“[A] savagely satirical thriller.” —People
The Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.
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 presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, 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. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.
But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s 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 study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
BUY THE BOOK
These clubs recently read this book...
Community Reviews
What’s it about?
Mira and Shelley are long time eco-activists and part of a group (Birnam Wood) who find small plots of unused land and discreetly use it to produce fruits/vegetables for those in need. When their group gets caught up with a billionaire many conflicts arise.
What did it make me think about?
New Zealand.
Should I read it?
I read The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and loved it years ago. I have been waiting for her second novel for a long time. Every time I read the jacket cover on this book I put it aside. It just sounded boring. It was NOT boring. This is a well-written, smart novel. However, my problem with it was that it had so many esoteric arguments that sometimes it made my head hurt and it slowed the plot down. It almost seemed to be trying to impress…. Well I still liked it and I still think Eleanor Catton is an amazing writer. So I recommend this one with reservations.
Quote-
“Tony was very proud to be well-read, and had often railed against the defensive anti-intellectualism that defined his country’s culture, but he had nevertheless recognized in himself, at times, a deep desire to perform a kind of excessive rugged practicality in compensation for his bookishness, submitting himself to physical privations, testing his strength and his endurance well beyond what was called for, and devising circuitous home-made solutions to problems that could be solved much more easily, and often more cheaply, by paying someone else to fix them. It hadn’t been until he’d gone abroad that he’d been able to identify this trait as itself particularly Kiwi, reflecting a broader attitude held among his countrymen that to do a thing with effort was always more respectable than to have it done with ease; inconvenience, in New Zealand, tended to be treated as a test of character, such that it was a point of national pride to be able to withstand discomfort or poor service without giving in to the temptation to complain.”
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.