I remember being impressed by the range and ambition and intricate structure of The Luminaries, the novel that made Eleanor Catton the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize, but not feeling particularly touched by it emotionally. So many characters made it hard to feel invested in any particular one. It was a book I read with more admiration than enthusiasm.

Birnam Wood, on the other hand, grabbed me from the start and wouldn’t let go. It ends as a thriller, but hardly starts out as one; on the contrary, it begins quietly, but immediately draws the reader into the complicated, contradictory emotional lives of the first three people we first meet: Shelley and Mira, two friends in their late 20s who are members of a guerilla gardening collective, and Tony, a former member who had a thing with Mira but has lost touch with her and has been abroad for several years, teaching English in Mexico.

Catton gives us a view inside each of these people by turn, and the difference between how they think about themselves and how the others view them is utterly fascinating. Shelley wants to leave the collective but doesn’t know how to tell Mira; Mira already suspects it’s coming. Mira presents as bold and resolute; inside, she’s something of a mess. Shelley is the opposite, running herself down, resenting her position as Mira’s sidekick yet feeling stuck in it, oblivious to her own strengths. And Tony! Wishing to make a difference in the world, clever in certain respects, utterly clueless in many others. The slight edge of satire is sharp but never overdone.

Mira, always on the hunt for new locations for her furtive gardening projects, goes on a fact-finding mission to a disused sheep farm she’s learned about, a place that was set to be subdivided until a landslide turned it into a cul-de-sac for an indeterminate period, as the one road through is blocked and the property is bounded by national parkland. While looking around, she runs into a mysterious man who does not believe her cover story about being a location scout for a movie, and seems to know an alarming amount about Mira.

The mystery man turns out to be Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire who made his fortune in surveillance drones. Officially, he is (secretly) buying the farm because he wants to build a luxury bunker there. In fact, he has an even more secret agenda. In the gardening collective, he senses opportunity….

That Lemoine is something of a cartoon villain in his blinding intellect, pure, amoral self-interest and prowess with surveillance technology, and yet does not seem any less improbable than some real-life versions of the same thing — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs come to mind — is a sad testament to the world we live in. He introduces a whole new level of crazy to this story, yet it all seems plausible enough. Actions have consequences, leading to other consequences; Catton has set up her dominoes and everything falls as it must.

Birnam Wood is the name of Mira’s stealth gardening organization, yet it also recalls the moveable forest that portended Macbeth’s doom. As the story goes on, this association becomes clearer. The novel does not try to do anything as clumsy as retell Macbeth, yet the way that incident follows incident, accelerating and increasingly high-stakes, careering toward inevitable disaster, is reminiscent of that play.

It’s more than 400 pages, and I read it in two days. Did not want to put it down. Emerging blinking into the world, going, what WAS that? And that, reader, is the mark of a good book.