Eleanor Catton discusses the authors and ideas that inspired her to write her new novel, Birnam Wood.
Birnam Wood is on the move…
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, 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. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
A gripping literary thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. It is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions, and consequences, and an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
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THIRD APPARITION
Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.
MACBETH
That will never be:
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root?
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