Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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, an 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. Then Mira, Birnam Wood's founder,  stumbles on an answer: 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. (From McClelland & Stewart)

Birnam Wood is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 11.

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• Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton's new novel, Birnam Wood, is a moral thriller for our times

Eleanor Catton is a London, Ont.-born New Zealand author. She won the 2013 Booker Prize for fiction and the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for her second novel, The Luminaries.

Interviews with Eleanor Catton

Writers and Company59:02Booker winner Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood, is a moral thriller for our times

In 2013, Canadian-born, New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton made history when she became the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize. Catton was just 28 and her novel, The Luminaries, went on to become an international bestseller. Catton later adapted her novel for a BBC-TV mini-series and wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film production of Jane Austen's Emma. Now, her much anticipated new novel, Birnam Wood, a page-turning eco-thriller set in New Zealand's South Island, tackles some of the biggest issues of our time, including the climate crisis, digital surveillance and economic inequality.

On The Coast10:55Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton about her new book "Birnam Wood"

She speaks with Gloria Macarenko before her visit to the Vancouver Writer's Fest.

Other books by Eleanor Catton