Birnam Wood: A Novel

"Sure! One of the biggest is Eleanor Catton, with her hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood . Catton became the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize in 2013 , with the longest-ever novel— The Luminaries , a complex, astrology-infused tale of goldrush-era New Zealand. This new book, which has been pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller , follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker. I liked what Francis Spufford had to say about it: “If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this.” Sounds irresistible to me. Birnam Wood will be released at the start of March on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s also a new book from Salman Rushdie , Victory City , his fifteenth novel. It’s a fantastical epic, which opens in 14th-century India and features a nine-year-old orphan selected by the goddess Parvati to be her human vessel. The Times has described it as “a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season,” full of “lush, romantic language.” (Rushdie, who is still recovering from a brutal knife attack last summer, is reported to be in daily contact with Hanif Kureishi , the acclaimed British writer who suffered a serious spinal injury in December and remains in hospital in Rome.)"