Birnam Wood a Gripping Explosive Thriller

“It’s taken [New Zealander] Eleanor Catton 10 years to follow up on her Booker Prize winning novel of 2013, The Luminaries. Fortunately, her latest offering, Birnam Wood, begins with a bang, quite literally. A series of earthquakes in the Korowai Pass, a protected region [in the] South Island, triggers a landslide,” Shahidha Bari writes in a review of the book for the Financial Times.

“This is a deeply enjoyable, action-packed book, an accomplished new offering in the expanding literary sub-genre of ‘cli-fi’,” Bari writes. “It comes in variously dystopian or utopian forms, and it’s the mark of Catton’s exceptional storytelling that she won’t let us work out which side Birnam Wood will fall — until the very end.”

In another review, published by The Washington Post, Ron Charles writes:

“Birnam Wood is a sleek contemporary thriller … It’s not so much a change of tack as a demonstration that Catton, 37, is a master at adapting literary forms to her own sly purposes.”

Original article by Shahidha Bari, Financial Times, February 16, 2023.