Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

A gripping psychological thriller from Eleanor Catton, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character
“A generational cri de coeur... A sophisticated page-turner... Birnam Wood nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles... Greta Gerwig could film this novel, but so could Quentin Tarantino.”  -  Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. 

Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, an enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

“Complex and often shocking... Birnam Wood’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated. Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition.”  -  B.D. McClay, The New Yorker

A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.