Birnam Wood is on the move...
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.
But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
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THE KOROWAI PASS HAD BEEN CLOSED SINCE THE END of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below.- 1
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(Granta Books, 2 March 2023, e-book, 230 pages, borrowed from North Ayrshire Council Libraries via BorrowBox)
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I really enjoyed Birnam Wood. I've wanted to read it since I saw it featured in an episode of The Big Scottish Book Club. I didn't enjoy the author book The Luminaries but might revisit it and her other books as I enjoyed this so much. This is a psychological thriller but nothing like what you'd normally expect from the genre. It's very different in a good way. I liked all of the characters and the concept of the group the book takes it's name from. This is well-written and engaging. I was riveted from start to finish.
