2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award
Shortlist Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
Click here to visit 2024 Ockhams Sampler with an extract & Judge's comment.
www.nzbookawards.nz
Click here to visit rnz.co.nz, author interview with Eleanor Catton
Click here to visit www.kirkusreviews.com starred review of Birnam Wood
Read by Karen (retired Bookseller); Birnam Wood is set in NZ's South Island in 2017. Mira Bunting, a young idealistic woman, in charge of Birnam Wood. An assorted group of anti-captalist gardeners, who aim to turn unused land into food gardens by whatever means necessary, sometimes unlawfully.
The first part of the novel begins with detailed, in depth descriptions of the many characters, their relationships and tensions. Further on the pace of this thriller picks up with billonaires, espionage, politics and corruption.
A very contemporary read with climate change, the power and abuse of technology. Building to an extraordinary gripping and suspenseful read. I was left breathless at the end.
An excellent literary thriller.
Birnam Wood is on the move ...
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in the South Island of New Zealand, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.
‘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, author of Super-Infinite
Sense of place; Aotearoa/New Zealand
Contemporary
Eleanor Catton
Trade Paperback pg 423