In “Birnam Wood”, Eleanor Catton returns with a thriller
The Booker-winner’s new novel pits a billionaire against a guerrilla gardening group
“THE LUMINARIES”, the novel that made Eleanor Catton, at 28, the youngest-ever winner of the Booker prize, is set in a frontier town in New Zealand. Published in 2013, it opens in the smoking room of a hotel where an assortment of strangers are dressed in “frock-coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric and twill”. In Ms Catton’s new novel, “Birnam Wood”, the characters wear dark gloves, balaclavas and jackets zipped to the throat, listening out for a “shout of warning, or a gunshot, or the now unmistakable sound of a drone”. The setting is still New Zealand, but instead of 1866 the date is 2017.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The profits of doom”
Culture March 11th 2023
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- In “Birnam Wood”, Eleanor Catton returns with a thriller
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