Birnam Wood
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.8
Eleanor Catton
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA 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 TelegraphA Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick“[A] savagely satirical thriller.” —PeopleThe 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.
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More Details:
Author
Eleanor Catton
Pages
432
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date
2023-03-07
ISBN
0374718016 9780374718015
Community ReviewsSee all
"I am having a really hard time getting into this book. Is it really that good??"
m c
melanie cameron
"Like the tremors that set off the deadly landslide at the start of the book, each of the characters makes choices and calculations that reverberate and impact each other with no less significance than our aforementioned landslide. Like a chess board or a Rubik's cube, each character's consequential turn propels the group toward an inevitable conclusion. We read a lot about the internal plans and schemes of each, but the ideas of observation, spying, and surveillance permeate the story. The players' destinies are all interconnected, and it's interesting that each section that focuses on a particular character ends on another. That second character then becomes the subject of the next section. Intriguing! <br/><br/>The first part is a slow build. But, the characters are developed, dynamics are set, and the settings are established. The pace picks up in the middle part, and then the quick flight downslope to the culmination ensues. <br/><br/>I wasn't sure what to make of this book, and I put off reading it for some time. But, it was a pleasant surprise - not what I expected. I did not see the ending coming. What a closing!!"
P G
Paul Garcia
"I heard mixed reviews about this book but I really enjoyed it. "
M
Meredith
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