Birnam Wood: A Novel

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 Prizewinning 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 Zealands South Island, cutting o 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 Birnams founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. Hes intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although theyre 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 Prizewinning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Cattons Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both inuences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, uninching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.