Booktopia Comments
'The perfect literary thriller - smart, gripping, and darkly funny. Birnam Wood is as acutely clever as it is compulsively readable. I love it.' - Ben Hunter, Fiction Category Manager
Product Description
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Luminaries.
FROM THE WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
Birnam Wood is on the move...
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.
But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, 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, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
About the Author
Eleanor Catton is the author of The Luminaries (Granta, 2013), winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award and an international bestseller. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal (Granta, 2009), won the Betty Trask Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen's Emma for feature film. Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.
Industry Reviews
'Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work-what a treat.' - Stephen King
'Infinitely nuanced... If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this' - Francis Spufford
'Phenomenal, gripping and darkly funny, Birnam Wood has the sense of a literary writer setting herself free. It's fantastic. I loved it' - Jessie Burton
'It's electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller, and an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill... Breathtaking' - Katherine Rundell
