A climate drama set in New Zealand

MOVE OVER SCI-FI-here comes cli-fi, or climate fiction. Where the glory days of mid-century science fiction were fuelled by fears of nuclear war and robot overlords, cli-fi focuses on the havoc wrought by the very real threat of climate change. And the pulse-racing Birnam Wood, from Canadaborn, New Zealand-based author Eleanor Catton, is creepy cli-fi at its best.

- BY Emily Landau

The book takes place in 2017, as climate terror and predatory capitalism converge in a web of conspiracy and murder (the title fittingly comes from an ominous prophecy in Macbeth). At first blush, though, its premise doesn't sound much like a thriller.

Friends Mira and Shelley are the founders of Birnam Wood, a guerilla gardening collective in New Zealand that surreptitiously plants crops next to highways and on abandoned land.

By chance, Mira meets Robert Lemoine, an American tech billionaire who tells them he put down a deposit on a farm in their country, where he plans to build a luxury bunker for the apocalypse, and offers them funding.

Of course, as these things tend to go, the generous act is too good to be true.