Joan's picks: Birnam Wood and Becky

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – who of course won the Booker Prize for The Luminaries. This book could not be more different – and is astonishingly good. Set in NZ, it’s about an ideologically driven guerrilla gardening group who plant crops in unused spaces, and when they hear about a farm in the South Island which has been abandoned after a major slip cut it off, they think that could be a great place to plant things. They reckon without an American billionaire (surely modelled on Peter Thiel) who also has his eyes on the farm, who tells them that he’s building an end of days bunker there. Things become exhilarating for them, and then utterly terrifying. When I read this last year I said that it might well be my book of 2023.   Becky by Sarah May. Fiction – a bit of a mash up between William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair with its heroine Becky Sharpe; and the modern day Rebekah Brooks who was editor of the News of the World during the phone hacking scandal of the 90’s. Our fictional Becky is a merger of the two – desperate to escape her past in a small town, and ruthlessly ambitious once she starts working on a London tabloid, where nothing will stand in her way. Really well done and great fun.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.