INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award CBC Books' #1 Canadian Novel of 2023 Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, Kirkus Reviews, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, and many more One of Barack Obama's 2023 Summer Reading List titles From the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries comes an electrifying thriller about ambition, greed, environmental collapse, and how even our best intentions can lead to deadly consequences. 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, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For Mira, Birnam Wood’s founder, 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. It is an unflinching look at the surprising consequences of even our most well-intended actions, and an enthralling consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Birnam Wood starts pretty strongly but falls apart at the end. That's what everyone at NUBClub agreed on. How good the novel was despite this is where we argued. Overall, the setup of the eco-art project of Birnam Wood and the complex tension in founders Mira and Shelley's relationship around it was a really good story. The apex of the book was probably the collective meeting where Mira announces the possible investment by billionaire Robert Lemoine and Mira's ex Tony imploding in front of the group. Catton shows off what she's really good at here -- keeping track of many characters and keeping their voices and motivations clear in a complex web of ambition and hurt. We honestly felt we could just read a novel about that group's dynamics and have a great story. The issue comes up around Lemoine. The rich guy stealing resources from the New Zealand wilderness was ok as a plot, but Lemoine's consciousness is just noxious. We know he's basically meant to be an evil send-up of the 1% (cough, Elon Musk, cough), but why is it interesting to see him internally cackle at using his wealth and charm to manipulate the poor activists? This could be forgivable, because we're in Macbeth after all (see the novel's title) and the usurper being arrogant is basically the spine of the story. But it's where the plot goes in the second half that derails everything. It's not great that Tony becomes the solitary wood-stalking journalist who uncovers the plot and then does a daring, river diving escape from Lemoine's stormtrooper-level goons, but even that could get a pass given the momentum in the story that Lemoine needs to be stopped. But then the murder happens and everything falls apart. Suddenly, Shelley is a totally complicit callous operator, dealing with her guilt from the car accident by selling out totally? And when it ends in a faked mass suicide, a grieving wife unknowingly penetrating all of Lemoine's army to shoot him dead, and then somehow Tony escaping the massacre to bring the whole thing down in a final act of resistance, wow, I mean, where do I start? Some of the moves don't actually make sense (if the grieving wife is shot in the back by a soldier right after she's freed Tony, how did the soldier not shoot Tony too?) but all of it feels like Catton just decided to turn the speaker to 11, character consistency and worldbuilding be damned. For some of us, it was a bridge too far, but others enjoyed the first part of the novel enough to gloss over the flaws of the ending. Your mileage is going to vary here. We can say that none of this soured us on Catton as a writer. We'll read her next novel. We just hope she keeps her stories a little less explosive in the future.