JCC August Book Club
Join us for our book club at the Boston JCC on August 14 to discuss “Birnham Wood” by Eleanor Catton. We will meet at the Boston JCC in the Teen Room.
About Birnham Wood:
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is set on New Zealand’s South Island where an American tech billionaire is up to no good on a nature reserve and a guerrilla gardening group summon the courage to fight back.
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.
But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?