A good standard thriller. Interesting characters, interesting/unique setting, twists and turns. An enjoyable quick read.

Birnam Wood is an interesting literary thriller that shines in its writing and fascinating characters. The pacing felt a tad off at times but I stuck with it and the ending was one that will stay with me for years.

I loved this author's earlier work, The Luminaries, so I was very much looking forward to this one! It is also very good, and entirely different. The storyline, about a grassroots environmental group that gets mixed up with a billionaire with his own agenda, is really unique. The characters are well-developed, and the book moves along at a good pace - quite suspenseful with elements of a psychological thriller - while examining important issues such as climate change and the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This was a entertaining read. Not sure how much of it I will remember on the long term. I don't think I will continue thinking about it months later, but it was entertaining while reading.

This was my first Eco-thriller. Set near a fictionalised national park in Australia, a young group of eco activists who call themselves Birnam Wood partner up with a tech billionaire to rewild and grow veggies on some unused land bordering a national park. Is the partnership really what it seems or is there an ulterior motive? A former founding member of Birnam Wood doesn't believe they should go along with the deal. He decides to do some investigative journalism, and can't believe what he stumbles upon while hiking through the park. This novel is a bit of a slow build, but once the pace picks up you won't be able to put it down.

On the surface, Birnam Wood is a thriller with a big bad capitalist villain and some hippie heroes, but it’s also a startling commentary on the power discrepancy in contemporary society. The final sentence is so hopeful as Tony prays that “somebody would see it…somebody would notice…somebody would care.”

Great story, great concentration on development of each character. Great show of greed of the privileged and how money. can try to solve everything. Idealistic young people being turned around and then the ending seemed awful and not fully explained.

This book blew me away. It was such a compelling story, the characters were so interesting I was just so invested in them. There was so much story and then BANG it was over! Leaves you breathless!

I'll start by saying that I really enjoyed this book but I am not sure that it's a book that would be enjoyable unless you have a certain set of interests and are familiar with a certain kind of progressive/leftist viewpoint and the type of people who hold these views. Nevertheless, this book was an interesting look into climate change, the intersection of government interests and billionaire interests, and how the lofty ideals people have about themselves and their ideologies are probably going to be trumped by their own personal drama and relationships. The end result is something akin to a Shakespearean tragedy (the title's reference to MacBeth makes that clear), and the ending itself still has me reeling from the shock of it all.

Love the idea of a a guerrilla gardening group! Am a fan of Catton's previous book Luminaries so was excited to give this a read and it didn't disappoint. Beautiful writing although dense at times, interesting characters and timely, relevant topics. Loved the New Zealand setting. This book is readable, timely, political and worth your time!

Birnam Wood is an eco-thriller, about a guerrilla gardening collective and a billionaire building an end-times bunker, trying to trust each other in a shared space at Thorndike farm.

The synopsis for this sounded right up my alley, and the idea of a guerrilla gardening collective sounded absolutely bonkers, which is what made me request Birnam Wood. But it did not take long for me to decide I didn’t jive with the writing style of this.

I like chapters. I like page breaks. I like clear points of view. I like short sentences that get to the point. Birnam Wood has none of these things, and I gave up pretty quickly after about 30 pages.

Other reviews say this is a bit of slow burn, there’s a bit of an info dump at the start, and it starts to really ramp up until a bit of an explosive ending (maybe literally, I’m a bit unclear on that, but for everyone else’s sake, I’m kind of hoping they mean literally!). It looks like if you can push through a slow start, it’s well worth continuing, and the guerrilla gardening collective is bonkers. This sounds like the type of thing I would prefer as a movie, because the story has my attention, but I just don’t want to push myself through the struggle of not loving a writing style.

Others do seem to really love this, so I think if the synopsis has your attention, you need to give it a shot and see how the writing works for you!

Having read this author before, I had high hopes for this book but for me, it fell a bit short. I think it would have benefitted from a bit more ruthless editing to tighten up the narrative.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm still talking and thinking about Eleanor Catton. I've found myself a new favourite author and am (really) excited about it.

I requested and received Birnam Wood on #netgalley while I was in the middle of reading Catton's 2013 840-ish page Booker-winning novel THE LUMINARIES (scroll down to read more about that book).

I had no idea what to expect but loved Luminaries so much that I couldn't wait to see what this book was about.

It could not have been any different. And this surprised and impressed me more about Catton.

Partly inspired by Macbeth, and set in New Zealand, Birnam Wood is about a group of young twenty-something environmentalist guerilla gardeners who end up getting embroiled in the dealings of a billionaire drone manufacturer.

The novel is part eco-thriller, part social commentary about our modern-day politics, power and their effects on the world; what choices will people make to survive; and if we are given enough rope, will we hang ourselves. 

I just loved it. The characters, the suspense, the environmental themes, and commentaries on the world.

I know I'm gushing about Catton and I just don't care. 

It's 5-stars for me.

I also hope that we don't have to wait for another ten years for her next book.

Thank you to @penguinrandomca and @netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

This was a very good read, and I very much enjoyed the author's point of view and insight into relationships. Would have given it five starts if it wasn't just a little darker than I prefer.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in advance.
I'm afraid I did not enjoy it as much as Luminaires which I loved. I read this book, right until the bitter end. I think the greed of some didn't sit well with me, when you have them hiding behind environmentalists. The book is well written, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Contemporary Fiction | Adult
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In Eleanor Catton’s followup to the award-winning The Luminaries, she has created a fictional guerilla gardening collective named Birnam Wood. Set in New Zealand, the anticapitalist, loosely organized activist group of ecogardeners plants vegetables and flowers on untended land - sometimes with permission and sometimes without. They harvest the crops and create food for sharing, or selling to generate some cash for more seed and supplies. Their goal is to “break good” – earn enough money to make the initiative sustainable, and then be able to offer it up as a realistic alternative to the capitalism that is killing the planet. It’s a goal that has so far eluded them, but when de facto leader Mira Bunting learns that a series of earthquakes has closed off a key pass near Thorndike in the South Island, a nearby farm will be deserted for months – the perfect location for a major planting effort that could help Birnam Wood turn the corner financially. But when she arrives, she discovers American billionaire Robert Lemoine is also interested in Thorndike; in fact, he confides, he is buying it to build a bunker as a refuge from the coming climate apocalypse. But her work intrigues him, he tells her, and he proposes a deal that could take Birnam Wood into the break good state. Can she trust him? Her best friend and group administrator Shelley Noakes is excited that this opportunity could be the one allowing her to leave the group in good shape; former member and wannabe journalist Tony Gallo objects vehemently. The farmer owners, Owen and Jill Darvish, are repulsed by Lemoine, but push the emotion down as they settle on a sale price. Catton, a New Zealander born in Canada, devotes a significant portion of the novel developing these main characters through lengthy philosophical discussions that could turn off some readers. They are long. Despite that they are interesting reading though I didn’t always understand them fully. Once Catton has fully fleshed out the characters’ motivations, fears, and flaws, the plot starts to develop. Lemoine is using the land for far more nefarious reasons than a bunker, and, uber-capitalist that he is, will go to any lengths to protect his money and make more. Gallo is right to suspect him, though his ineptitude and hubris make it unlikely he will succeed in proving it. The Darvishes learn the price they set is far higher than they realize; Bunting and Noakes discover their principles are not as rigid as they think, and it all leads to a massively destructive ending that I loved. Shakespeare fans will recognize the book’s title as a reference to MacBeth; Catton has said she wanted to write a novel in which any of the characters could be the doomed MacBeth of the story. Indeed. I do think the beginning is longer than it needed to be, but stick with it to discover a complex, ingeniously plotted ecothriller with important messages about greed, ambition, privacy, and most of all human frailty. My thanks to McClelland & Stewart for the digital reading copy provided through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Grand Forks (B.C.) & District Public Library has a copy in its adult fiction collection, though expect a waitlist.
More discussion and reviews of this novel: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61151427

Admittedly, I first found Eleanor Catton’s latest novel slow-paced but once the stakes are raised, it was hard to put down. It took unexpected turns, leading to a jaw-dropping conclusion.

The novel presents the perspectives of four main characters, as it explores the consequences of an encounter between members of a environmental group, Birnam Wood, which is set on expanding its gardens, subversively, on private properties, where no one would notice the addition of vegetable plants, and an American billionaire, building bunkers on private land in a small New Zealand town. While the billionaire, Robert Lemoine, offers to invest in Birnam Wood’s venture, the differing views, with capitalism and anarchy coming to a head, leads to clashes and paranoia between the main characters.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for the ARC.

This is a truly excellent literary thriller with Shakespearean heft that I can't stop thinking about. Gorgeous prose, gleefully excellent dialogue and deeply dimensional characters that are going to haunt me forever.

My first thought about this book was that it needs to be edited. The plot often got bogged down with minutiae. While I appreciated the need to tell the readers about the background of the characters, etc, I found myself wanting to get on with the story.

What a ride! Birnam Wood is so difficult to compartmentalize - it's part thriller, part eco-statement. Eleanor Catton has such a way with words -the prose made me feel as though I had stepped into a university class. I kept expecting someone to ask me to explain the deeper meaning of a section of dialogue! It's thought-provoking and terrifying - a unique combination which had me racing through the book. Thank you NetGalley for my copy, my thoughts and opinions are my own.