Birnam Wood

Catton grafts an eco-collective's guerrilla gardening scheme onto land a billionaire is quietly buying up for his own doomsday purposes, and the novel's tension comes from how long she lets both sides believe they're the clear-eyed ones. The book is plotted like a thriller, with drone surveillance and a body count by the end, but its real interest is in mapping the specific self-deceptions of each faction: the collective's righteousness curdling into justification, the billionaire's survivalism dressed up as pragmatism. Reviewers repeatedly praised the dialogue's unforced, funny naturalism as the engine that makes the satire land, and the way Catton keeps the book balanced right at the edge of nihilism without quite tipping over is what separates it from a straightforward morality tale about late capitalism.