Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

This one surprised me. After reading the first few pages I was starting to think that I didn't much like the writing style and I didn't really like the characters and if it had been a Wednesday (library day) I may well have taken it back and got myself something else. Then all of a sudden it perked up. It was a bit like one of those films that starts in black and white and then flips into colour when the story gathers pace - and it certainly gathers pace! By the time I got to the last third of the book I could barely put it down.

The Birnam Wood of the title is a gardening collective of people who go around planting vegetables on little pockets of land that don't seem to get any attention from anyone else. The produce is then used to help feed the group and the remainder is sold to raise funds for anything they can't get by upcycling things discarded by other people. It's all very small scale until they receive an offer of funding from a billionaire who says he wants to enhance his green credentials.

Even billionairs don't do anything that doesn't offer something in return, but it takes a while for the dark side of the deal to be revealed. I won't give away the plot, but I was constantly impressed by how plausible it all was. Sometimes you read a thriller where the characters make decisions that are so difficult to believe that for the rest of the book you find yourself muttering 'as if...', but not here. When the decent people in the book are forced to agree to help cover up a serious crime, the consequences of not helping are so great that there is no longer any choice, and I could really see how they came to act against everything they knew to be right.

Now that I have finished it, I would recommend it to anyone who likes a tense thriller but has got a bit bored with disgruntled spies and undercover agents doing one last job for a friend.

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