Our Book of the Week is the much-anticipated new novel from Eleanor Catton, the author of the Booker-winning The Luminaries. BIRNAM WOOD is an eco-thriller that holds a mirror to our current political and environmental predicaments and the range of forces — personal, societal, global — that complicate our positions in and responses to those circumstances and to each other.  A landslide in a small South Island community collides a group of guerrilla gardeners with an American billionaire in circumstances of increasing existential threat in this gripping novel that echoes Macbeth in its exposure of the darker workings of the human psyche and the corrosivity of power. 
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
"Birnam Wood is electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller. It has an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill, and formidable love. It’s literally, physically breathtaking." – Katherine Rundell
"What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this." — Francis Spufford
"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work—what a treat." — Stephen King
"Mysterious and marvelously unpredictable, Birnam Wood had me reading the way I used to as a kid―curiously, desperately and as if it was the whole world. Catton connects to the natural and unnatural ways in which we try to control our environments, our impulses and one another. A spectacular novel, conjured by a virtuoso." — Rivka Galchen


VOLUME BooksBook of the week