Birnam Wood

Birnam Wood

Eleanor Catton

#1013 of 8,085 books · #255 in Crime & Thriller

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize (2023), the Kirkus Prize for Fiction (2023), and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (2023).

Birnam Wood won the Booker Prize and was an international bestseller, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award for Fiction, longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award, CBC Books' #1 Canadian Novel of the Year, named a Best Book of the Year by 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, and Apple iBooks Canada, and was a Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick. 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, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For Mira, Birnam Wood's founder, 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.