BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

“This blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism manages to also be a wildly fun read.”

birnam wood

guide and driver, Omar. Bollen, author of Lightning People (2011) and Orient (2015), takes real risks with the story, making it more haunting than the reader may be prepared for.

A gripping thriller with lingering emotional effects.

BIRNAM WOOD

Catton, Eleanor Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $28.00 | March 7, 2023 9780374110338

An eco-activist group in New Zealand becomes entangled with an American billionaire in Catton’s first novel since the Booker Prize–winning The Luminaries (2013).

Mira Bunting is the brainchild behind Birnam Wood, an “activist collective” of guerrilla gardeners who plant on unused land (sometimes with permission) and scavenge (or steal) materials to grow food. Mira is a “self-mythologising rebel” whose passions are tempered only somewhat by Shelley Noakes, who sees herself as Mira’s “sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick.” This role is starting to chafe—as is the lack of money— and Shelley plans to leave Birnam Wood. Just as Shelley’s about to cut ties, Mira makes an announcement: On a recent scouting trip near Korowai National Park, she located a farming property owned by a Kiwi farmer named Owen Darvish, temporarily abandoned due to a recent earthquake. This land is soon to transfer ownership from Darvish to an uber-rich tech CEO looking for a spot to doomstead. When the businessman, Robert Lemoine, catches Mira scouting on the land, he offers to bankroll the group to the tune of $100,000 since the act will help his bid for New Zealand citizenship. What could go wrong? Catton swirls among perspectives, including those of Mira, Shelley, Lemoine, Darvish and his wife, and a former Birnam Wood member called Tony, whose aspirations to fame look within reach as he suspects he’s got a major scoop concerning Lemoine’s real motives. In many ways, the novel is as