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Land
The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Blight.
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.
385 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 2, 2026
About the author
Maggie O'Farrell
49 books20.8k followersMaggie O'Farrell (born 1972, Coleraine Northern Ireland) is a British author of contemporary fiction, who features in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels - the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 6,712 reviews
June 2, 2026
I thought I understood the Irish Potato Famine that killed more than a million people and sent millions more fleeing abroad. But a few years ago, during a tour of Trinity College Dublin, our guide paused to mention the Great Hunger.
He couldn’t have been more than 30 years old, but the fury in his voice had not cooled since the 1850s. The cruelty of the British government, its catastrophic inaction in the face of mass starvation — that wasn’t history to this young man. It felt as raw and immediate as the loss of his own siblings.
Maggie O’Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland, opens her new novel, Land, in 1865, during the stunned aftermath of the Great Hunger, on the famine-scarred west coast of Ireland. Towns have shriveled. Villages have emptied. Rows of empty cottages have succumbed to rot.
It’s here on a damp, windswept promontory that we find a pair of Irishmen, Tomás and his dutiful 10-year-old son, Liam. They’re working for the British army, part of the enormous Ordnance Survey to map — and further subjugate — Ireland. Despite deeply conflicted feelings about his employer, Tomás is tireless and taciturn. Having survived the famine that took every member of his family, he knows the importance of steady work, the necessity of submission.
“He is the only one of their division,” O’Farrell writes, “who can measure and calculate, draw detailed draft maps in ink for the engravers to copy, and also converse with the people about where the boundaries lie, who owns which field, what this valley or that bluff is called and why, where might the ruins of this building be.”
As she demonstrated in Hamnet, her magnificent novel about the death of Shakespeare’s only son, O’Farrell once again opens up the past like she’s cracking a geode. Suddenly, the undulating fields are sparkling in the moist air, redolent with the incongruous scents of peat and political oppression.
Stomping into a copse to retrieve Liam’s lost boot, Tomás stumbles upon a....
You can read the rest of this review for free on Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/in-...
He couldn’t have been more than 30 years old, but the fury in his voice had not cooled since the 1850s. The cruelty of the British government, its catastrophic inaction in the face of mass starvation — that wasn’t history to this young man. It felt as raw and immediate as the loss of his own siblings.
Maggie O’Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland, opens her new novel, Land, in 1865, during the stunned aftermath of the Great Hunger, on the famine-scarred west coast of Ireland. Towns have shriveled. Villages have emptied. Rows of empty cottages have succumbed to rot.
It’s here on a damp, windswept promontory that we find a pair of Irishmen, Tomás and his dutiful 10-year-old son, Liam. They’re working for the British army, part of the enormous Ordnance Survey to map — and further subjugate — Ireland. Despite deeply conflicted feelings about his employer, Tomás is tireless and taciturn. Having survived the famine that took every member of his family, he knows the importance of steady work, the necessity of submission.
“He is the only one of their division,” O’Farrell writes, “who can measure and calculate, draw detailed draft maps in ink for the engravers to copy, and also converse with the people about where the boundaries lie, who owns which field, what this valley or that bluff is called and why, where might the ruins of this building be.”
As she demonstrated in Hamnet, her magnificent novel about the death of Shakespeare’s only son, O’Farrell once again opens up the past like she’s cracking a geode. Suddenly, the undulating fields are sparkling in the moist air, redolent with the incongruous scents of peat and political oppression.
Stomping into a copse to retrieve Liam’s lost boot, Tomás stumbles upon a....
You can read the rest of this review for free on Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/in-...
July 13, 2026
Sometimes a book comes along and sweeps you off your feet in a way you really couldn't have anticipated!!!
There is something about this book that now, having read it, leaves me feeling so nostalgic, full of melancholy and awe and so so in love with what literature can provide us. Following a family in the 1800s who venture on mapping the entirety of Ireland, we see the great hunger, the fragility of love, what it means to pursue a life for ourselves and the sacrifices of it all. This was a masterclass in storytelling and description - Maggie O'Farrell is absolutely one of the best novelists we currently have. Being so rich in historical context as well as showcasing nature as something mythical and everlasting, the book often felt as if it teetered on magical realism (this is so impressive to me as a writer).
Everything that has EVER existed STILL exists!!! will be thinking about this little family forever... I have never need to touch grass more (complimentary)
There is something about this book that now, having read it, leaves me feeling so nostalgic, full of melancholy and awe and so so in love with what literature can provide us. Following a family in the 1800s who venture on mapping the entirety of Ireland, we see the great hunger, the fragility of love, what it means to pursue a life for ourselves and the sacrifices of it all. This was a masterclass in storytelling and description - Maggie O'Farrell is absolutely one of the best novelists we currently have. Being so rich in historical context as well as showcasing nature as something mythical and everlasting, the book often felt as if it teetered on magical realism (this is so impressive to me as a writer).
Everything that has EVER existed STILL exists!!! will be thinking about this little family forever... I have never need to touch grass more (complimentary)
April 19, 2026
A glimpse at Maggie O’Farrell’s creative process in her opening letter to her readers - where she was when first line of this story came to her, a story she knows she’s meant to write, inspired by her great-great-grandfather. From the first sentence to the last this extraordinarily beautiful and complex novel is why Maggie O’Farrell is one of my very favorite writers . It’s a profound, multilayered story telling of events in Ireland’s history depicted through the struggles of a family whose heartaches over the years become our heartaches as we share their fear, loss, grief, their love as they make their way in life.
In 1865 Ireland, a discovery is made as ten year old Liam is working with his father, a land surveyor for the red coats. They find a spring, magical waters perhaps that will forever change the lives of Liam, his father Tomas and their family in the years to come. The recent past is brought forward through Tomas’ memory in some horrific scenes of the Great Hunger, gut wrenching, heartbreaking and unbearable memories of the times of hunger and death when he was a young boy. Later through his wife’s unbearable memories we get a picture of the struggles and loss and suffering of her family. As the years pass, I came to love this whole family. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the kind and wise widow who helps all of them through their struggles and their loyal dog Bran.
O’Farrell’s masterful storytelling weaves together multiple time lines and characters, bridging the folklore magic of ancient times to a time we recognize in the present setting of 1865. The changes in time are seamless. She draws on magical realism and this with the fairytale like stories of a millennia earlier never feel too much. These elements belong here . This is the story of the land, how this family toils to sustain themselves off the land, how Tomas has to reluctantly work for the red coats in order to pay the rent on the land on which they live by naming places and relegating ownership which he knows divides people, a story of the people who lived on this land before them, a story that comes full circle to the land in the future. I’m left in awe.
“A seanchaí is a traditional Gaelic storyteller or historian, serving as an oral repository.” (Wikipedia). O’Farrell is the modern seanchai telling the stories through the written word with beautiful writing . I predict that this will be my favorite book of the year.
I received a copy of this book from Knopf through NetGalley.
In 1865 Ireland, a discovery is made as ten year old Liam is working with his father, a land surveyor for the red coats. They find a spring, magical waters perhaps that will forever change the lives of Liam, his father Tomas and their family in the years to come. The recent past is brought forward through Tomas’ memory in some horrific scenes of the Great Hunger, gut wrenching, heartbreaking and unbearable memories of the times of hunger and death when he was a young boy. Later through his wife’s unbearable memories we get a picture of the struggles and loss and suffering of her family. As the years pass, I came to love this whole family. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the kind and wise widow who helps all of them through their struggles and their loyal dog Bran.
O’Farrell’s masterful storytelling weaves together multiple time lines and characters, bridging the folklore magic of ancient times to a time we recognize in the present setting of 1865. The changes in time are seamless. She draws on magical realism and this with the fairytale like stories of a millennia earlier never feel too much. These elements belong here . This is the story of the land, how this family toils to sustain themselves off the land, how Tomas has to reluctantly work for the red coats in order to pay the rent on the land on which they live by naming places and relegating ownership which he knows divides people, a story of the people who lived on this land before them, a story that comes full circle to the land in the future. I’m left in awe.
“A seanchaí is a traditional Gaelic storyteller or historian, serving as an oral repository.” (Wikipedia). O’Farrell is the modern seanchai telling the stories through the written word with beautiful writing . I predict that this will be my favorite book of the year.
I received a copy of this book from Knopf through NetGalley.
June 14, 2026
I had been looking forward to Land (2026) by Maggie O'Farrell for months. Unfortunately, my reading experience can be summarized in one sentence: high hopes gave way to disappointment.
Land is a historical novel set in Ireland in 1865 at the beginning, in the wake of the Great Famine. At the outset, it follows Tomás, a surveyor and mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey, as he and his young son Liam map a remote coastal peninsula. From there, the novel gradually evolves into a family saga. I found the first half of the book distinctively better. I thoroughly enjoyed the evocative nature descriptions and the magical elements of Irish folklore woven into the realistic narrative. Magical realism resurfaces at the very end of the novel, though in a rather bizarre way.
The second half of the book feels as if it were written by a different author. Sometimes there is a palpable lack of direction in the plot, as if Maggie O'Farrell was a bit unsure where the story should go. To compensate for this, she introduces a relentless succession of misfortunes and family tragedies. This parade of hardships became insufferable and seemed to lead nowhere, making it feel as though the author cared mostly about giving the reader a repeated emotional jolt.
At a certain point, I noticed that this excess of misery began to numb rather than move me. I caught myself coldly calculating what kind of calamity we could expect next. I felt like a character in a video game, wandering around through a landscape of predetermined disasters and waiting for the next blow to land. Gradually, my sympathy for Tomás and his family gave way to frustration with the author. Don't let the lush, vibrant colours on the cover fool you—they bear little resemblance to the bleak world contained within. I was genuinely surprised that O'Farrell never provided a meaningful counterweight to all this suffering.
It was also vexing that the plausibility of several events felt problematic. Could a poor widow, who owned nothing but a single cow, really afford to take in and feed a family with three children for at least a few weeks? Would Tomás be able to rebuild the ruins of a house on his own, in such a short time? The narrator explicitly notes that the local fisherman's visits during the construction were rather social. Furthermore, the ruins were located on a mountain that required an exhausting trek to reach. Besides, how on earth was dead body identified when it was found several days' walking distance from home? The area seemed entirely uninhabited, and there was no radio, telegraph, newspapers, etc. Just a few examples. On top of that, there are coincidences whose probability strains belief—such as Enda and her grandfather ending up in the exact same restaurant in Canada.
Both Hamnet (which I loved) and The Marriage Portrait (which I quite liked) possessed a deliberate structure. You could tell there was a core vision that O'Farrell executed with ironclad consistency. Here, by contrast, I felt as though I were being led by a tour guide who began the journey with only the vaguest outline of the route and improvised the rest along the way. Ironically, the story of a cartographer and his family seemed to need a better map.
I truly envy the readers who were once again swept under the spell of Maggie O'Farrell's storytelling and fell in love with this book. I didn't, despite my best efforts, although there were aspects that I admired immensely. I adore Ireland and have long been fascinated by its history and culture, so it was a pleasure to read a novel set during a lesser-known period of the country's past. I cannot judge its historical accuracy, but at times, it felt as though the novel was set in the Middle Ages rather than the late 19th century.
Some passages were truly stunning, especially at the beginning, and I appreciated the strong environmental and feminist undercurrents. One of the novel's strengths is its title: it works on multiple levels. I particularly enjoyed the range of meanings it suggests, from the physical landscape to the notion of a Promised Land. The book is also highly cinematic; a film adaptation is likely just a matter of time. All in all, I'm probably the one to blame: had my expectations not been so elevated, Land would have resonated with me more.
Land is a historical novel set in Ireland in 1865 at the beginning, in the wake of the Great Famine. At the outset, it follows Tomás, a surveyor and mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey, as he and his young son Liam map a remote coastal peninsula. From there, the novel gradually evolves into a family saga. I found the first half of the book distinctively better. I thoroughly enjoyed the evocative nature descriptions and the magical elements of Irish folklore woven into the realistic narrative. Magical realism resurfaces at the very end of the novel, though in a rather bizarre way.
The second half of the book feels as if it were written by a different author. Sometimes there is a palpable lack of direction in the plot, as if Maggie O'Farrell was a bit unsure where the story should go. To compensate for this, she introduces a relentless succession of misfortunes and family tragedies. This parade of hardships became insufferable and seemed to lead nowhere, making it feel as though the author cared mostly about giving the reader a repeated emotional jolt.
At a certain point, I noticed that this excess of misery began to numb rather than move me. I caught myself coldly calculating what kind of calamity we could expect next. I felt like a character in a video game, wandering around through a landscape of predetermined disasters and waiting for the next blow to land. Gradually, my sympathy for Tomás and his family gave way to frustration with the author. Don't let the lush, vibrant colours on the cover fool you—they bear little resemblance to the bleak world contained within. I was genuinely surprised that O'Farrell never provided a meaningful counterweight to all this suffering.
It was also vexing that the plausibility of several events felt problematic. Could a poor widow, who owned nothing but a single cow, really afford to take in and feed a family with three children for at least a few weeks? Would Tomás be able to rebuild the ruins of a house on his own, in such a short time? The narrator explicitly notes that the local fisherman's visits during the construction were rather social. Furthermore, the ruins were located on a mountain that required an exhausting trek to reach. Besides, how on earth was dead body identified when it was found several days' walking distance from home? The area seemed entirely uninhabited, and there was no radio, telegraph, newspapers, etc. Just a few examples. On top of that, there are coincidences whose probability strains belief—such as Enda and her grandfather ending up in the exact same restaurant in Canada.
Both Hamnet (which I loved) and The Marriage Portrait (which I quite liked) possessed a deliberate structure. You could tell there was a core vision that O'Farrell executed with ironclad consistency. Here, by contrast, I felt as though I were being led by a tour guide who began the journey with only the vaguest outline of the route and improvised the rest along the way. Ironically, the story of a cartographer and his family seemed to need a better map.
I truly envy the readers who were once again swept under the spell of Maggie O'Farrell's storytelling and fell in love with this book. I didn't, despite my best efforts, although there were aspects that I admired immensely. I adore Ireland and have long been fascinated by its history and culture, so it was a pleasure to read a novel set during a lesser-known period of the country's past. I cannot judge its historical accuracy, but at times, it felt as though the novel was set in the Middle Ages rather than the late 19th century.
Some passages were truly stunning, especially at the beginning, and I appreciated the strong environmental and feminist undercurrents. One of the novel's strengths is its title: it works on multiple levels. I particularly enjoyed the range of meanings it suggests, from the physical landscape to the notion of a Promised Land. The book is also highly cinematic; a film adaptation is likely just a matter of time. All in all, I'm probably the one to blame: had my expectations not been so elevated, Land would have resonated with me more.
June 21, 2026
Just the name of this title speaks of its expanse. O’Farrell takes us back through history on a journey unlikely to be forgotten.
The story begins mid 1860’s. Tomas, a cartologist, and his son Liam, are out mapping the country for the redcoats. One day, they find a copse in a valley which is distinctly different- magical- and it changes them.
Mid way, we are sent to the land even earlier. Here are the natives. Those who have lived and found these rivers. A young girl, Brith and her dog, roam the area until it is decided by the elders she is to be sacrificed for the gods to look favourably upon the land and replenish it. But this does not happen. Many perish of the Great Hunger.
O’Farrell’s journey and exploration of the land reflects those who deeply respect it and those who colonize and pillage it.
This is also a story of a family. How the land has shaped them into who they become; How it has also destroyed them as a unit.
The magical realism I wasn't sure of, however, O'Farrell does it in a graceful and seamless way.
I'm not sure how I feel about the ending but I do know I remain an adoring fan of O’Farrell’s beatific writing.
4.5⭐️
The story begins mid 1860’s. Tomas, a cartologist, and his son Liam, are out mapping the country for the redcoats. One day, they find a copse in a valley which is distinctly different- magical- and it changes them.
Mid way, we are sent to the land even earlier. Here are the natives. Those who have lived and found these rivers. A young girl, Brith and her dog, roam the area until it is decided by the elders she is to be sacrificed for the gods to look favourably upon the land and replenish it. But this does not happen. Many perish of the Great Hunger.
O’Farrell’s journey and exploration of the land reflects those who deeply respect it and those who colonize and pillage it.
This is also a story of a family. How the land has shaped them into who they become; How it has also destroyed them as a unit.
The magical realism I wasn't sure of, however, O'Farrell does it in a graceful and seamless way.
I'm not sure how I feel about the ending but I do know I remain an adoring fan of O’Farrell’s beatific writing.
4.5⭐️
June 17, 2026
2.5 Stars
As always, Maggie O'Farrell's writing is beautiful. The descriptions of the Irish landscape are vivid and atmospheric and haunting.
I was so excited to get my hands on this book as I love books by this author and was even more excited to learn she was setting this one in Ireland in the aftermath of the Irish Famine.
This started out promising and tells the story of Thomas and his son Liam mapping a peninsula in Ireland using surveying poles and measuring chains for the English. A famine survivor himself, who is dealing with his own ghosts he is glad of the work to put food on the table and the opportunity to record the empty homes and graveyards scared by the famine.
However much I wanted to love this book, I just couldn't connect with the story or the characters and felt it was dense, drawn out and soulless. I think I needed more history or just a good story to keep me rooting for the characters. This type of book I would normally devour in a few nights but this one dragged out for a week and a half. I am not a fan of magic realism and perhaps this is why I didn't love the novel as it has quite a lot of sprinklings of fairy dust.
The family's hardships was relentless and I was glad to part ways with them by the end of the novel.
Not one for my favourite shelf despite ordering a hard copy but perhaps it will find more joy on another readers bookshelf.
As always, Maggie O'Farrell's writing is beautiful. The descriptions of the Irish landscape are vivid and atmospheric and haunting.
I was so excited to get my hands on this book as I love books by this author and was even more excited to learn she was setting this one in Ireland in the aftermath of the Irish Famine.
This started out promising and tells the story of Thomas and his son Liam mapping a peninsula in Ireland using surveying poles and measuring chains for the English. A famine survivor himself, who is dealing with his own ghosts he is glad of the work to put food on the table and the opportunity to record the empty homes and graveyards scared by the famine.
However much I wanted to love this book, I just couldn't connect with the story or the characters and felt it was dense, drawn out and soulless. I think I needed more history or just a good story to keep me rooting for the characters. This type of book I would normally devour in a few nights but this one dragged out for a week and a half. I am not a fan of magic realism and perhaps this is why I didn't love the novel as it has quite a lot of sprinklings of fairy dust.
The family's hardships was relentless and I was glad to part ways with them by the end of the novel.
Not one for my favourite shelf despite ordering a hard copy but perhaps it will find more joy on another readers bookshelf.
June 21, 2026
An epic Irish story that takes you on quite a journey… starts off in 1865 after the years of the Great Hunger… it follows a family in an Irish peninsula… it’s a story of overlapping lives and haunting ghosts and tells the story of how the land remembers.
There are quite a few moments of magical realism but it pertains to the family history and history of the land.
Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is so good at transporting you to a time and place.
I loved all the family members but my goodness… there was tragedy after tragedy and I was just hoping throughout for something good to happen to them.
Regardless of the outcome, I enjoyed the journey.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the gifted ARC in exchange for an honest review.
There are quite a few moments of magical realism but it pertains to the family history and history of the land.
Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is so good at transporting you to a time and place.
I loved all the family members but my goodness… there was tragedy after tragedy and I was just hoping throughout for something good to happen to them.
Regardless of the outcome, I enjoyed the journey.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the gifted ARC in exchange for an honest review.
February 10, 2026
lol I literally cannot stop crying. Not because this was sad, but because I just….I loved it so much. Review to come when I can get myself together.
Okay I'm back...
I very well may have just read my favorite book of 2026. Reading Land felt like being told a Story with a capital S if that makes any sense. It felt like sitting at Maggie's feet, leaning further and further in the longer this magical epic went. This is so dramatic, but I cried for more than a little bit when this ended. Not because it was necessarily sad, but because it was so beautiful and I loved it so very much.
We open with a father (Tomas) and son (Liam) working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland in 1865. I learned through an introductory note from O'Farrell that her great-great grandfather worked on the early maps of Ireland not long after The Great Hunger, and researching his life was the impetus for this book. Tomas is determined to tell the real story through his maps of what the Red Coats did to his land and his people and not let the colonizer write that history.
Land is a sweeping story, covering the full lives of the parents and children and the land while also going further back and forward, making time feel not linear at all. It read like pure magic. Not just during the times O'Farrell inserts some magical realism, but all of it. Everything about this book feels alive. I knew every character inside and out. I knew the land and the family's house like it was a person. After all, it holds so much, from our buried loves on to our history and future. O'Farrell tells us that earth can be an ending to one story yet a beginning to another. The connections she makes between characters/the 4 parts of this story scratched the same itch for me that Hearts Invisible Furies did. The way the characters, at times, try imitate one another felt so Shakespearean.
Land leaves me with so much to think about. It sent me down a Gaelic Folklore rabbit hole. It left me stunned contemplating the idea of permanence and how it feels when something that is a constant, like the night sky, somehow isn't anymore. It left me considering honor and resistance in a new light and why leaving land might hurt worse than leaving existence entirely. And finally, it reminded me that my dad drew me a map for how to be, and while he isn't physically here anymore, I can still follow that map.
Okay I'm back...
I very well may have just read my favorite book of 2026. Reading Land felt like being told a Story with a capital S if that makes any sense. It felt like sitting at Maggie's feet, leaning further and further in the longer this magical epic went. This is so dramatic, but I cried for more than a little bit when this ended. Not because it was necessarily sad, but because it was so beautiful and I loved it so very much.
We open with a father (Tomas) and son (Liam) working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland in 1865. I learned through an introductory note from O'Farrell that her great-great grandfather worked on the early maps of Ireland not long after The Great Hunger, and researching his life was the impetus for this book. Tomas is determined to tell the real story through his maps of what the Red Coats did to his land and his people and not let the colonizer write that history.
Land is a sweeping story, covering the full lives of the parents and children and the land while also going further back and forward, making time feel not linear at all. It read like pure magic. Not just during the times O'Farrell inserts some magical realism, but all of it. Everything about this book feels alive. I knew every character inside and out. I knew the land and the family's house like it was a person. After all, it holds so much, from our buried loves on to our history and future. O'Farrell tells us that earth can be an ending to one story yet a beginning to another. The connections she makes between characters/the 4 parts of this story scratched the same itch for me that Hearts Invisible Furies did. The way the characters, at times, try imitate one another felt so Shakespearean.
Land leaves me with so much to think about. It sent me down a Gaelic Folklore rabbit hole. It left me stunned contemplating the idea of permanence and how it feels when something that is a constant, like the night sky, somehow isn't anymore. It left me considering honor and resistance in a new light and why leaving land might hurt worse than leaving existence entirely. And finally, it reminded me that my dad drew me a map for how to be, and while he isn't physically here anymore, I can still follow that map.
June 28, 2026
Land by Maggie O'Farrell unfolds not as a single story but as a long, patient inquiry into what survives.
The novel follows surveyor-cartographer Tomás and his family after a mystical encounter at an ancient well on the windswept western peninsula of Ireland.
If you have read Hamnet or The Marriage Portrait, you'll recognize the way O’Farrell moves the lens, sitting inside one consciousness for a paragraph, then sliding gently across the room to another.
Here, however, she expands the technique across decades and continents.
Lyrical, slow‑burning, and emotionally brutal, it either lands for you or it doesn’t: some will call it a masterpiece and others will find its weight unbearable.
What stays, after the last page, is not exactly the story. It is the peninsula and the sense that some places are older than the people walking on them and will outlast the maps drawn of them.
The land does not offer closure; it offers continuation.
August 2, 2026
My goodness this book was bleak and depressing.
(Yes, I know Ireland’s history is bleak and depressing, I just don’t need to read any more about it in my fiction.)
The overly descriptive prose and slow pacing makes the book feel longer than its 385 pages. The story jumps around a lot between characters and time periods, and the author uses heavy doses of magical realism and coincidence to drive the plot forward.
This is a fine example of tragedy porn. But due to the prose and structure, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to any of the characters. The tragedies that rained down on one family was so overdone it almost became comical. What else could possibly happen to this family? No worries, the author would find something
All these factors made this boring, tedious, and a slog to the finish line. I considered dnf’ing multiple times and should have followed my instincts
(Yes, I know Ireland’s history is bleak and depressing, I just don’t need to read any more about it in my fiction.)
The overly descriptive prose and slow pacing makes the book feel longer than its 385 pages. The story jumps around a lot between characters and time periods, and the author uses heavy doses of magical realism and coincidence to drive the plot forward.
This is a fine example of tragedy porn. But due to the prose and structure, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to any of the characters. The tragedies that rained down on one family was so overdone it almost became comical. What else could possibly happen to this family? No worries, the author would find something
All these factors made this boring, tedious, and a slog to the finish line. I considered dnf’ing multiple times and should have followed my instincts
June 15, 2026
I am stuck somewhere between 4 and 5!
Full review to come!
The year is 1865, Irish peninsula, post the Great Hunger. Villagers are abandoned, homes are ruined, mass graves everywhere. Tomas and his 10 year old son Liam are surveying these lands and the scars that were left behind. Tomas discovers a copse containing a sacred spring and disappears for days. When he reappears, he is a changed man and abandons his old life as a cartographer. He moves his entire family to this remote place despite the increasing strain. As the novel broadens into a multi-generational family saga, the heart of the story is mainly centered at the ancient story beneath the land.
This was one of my selected picks from BOTM. Let's dive in!
Full review to come!
The year is 1865, Irish peninsula, post the Great Hunger. Villagers are abandoned, homes are ruined, mass graves everywhere. Tomas and his 10 year old son Liam are surveying these lands and the scars that were left behind. Tomas discovers a copse containing a sacred spring and disappears for days. When he reappears, he is a changed man and abandons his old life as a cartographer. He moves his entire family to this remote place despite the increasing strain. As the novel broadens into a multi-generational family saga, the heart of the story is mainly centered at the ancient story beneath the land.
This was one of my selected picks from BOTM. Let's dive in!
May 30, 2026
No one writes historical fiction like Maggie O’Farrell. Her prior works, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, remain my all time favorite works of the genre and the two books I always recommend to fans of historical fiction. After finishing her newest work Land, I'll recommend it as well!
Land is an epic saga that is essentially the story of Ireland. Maggie delves into the Green Isles' rich history and the people who have inhabited the land over the centuries. From the potato famine (the great hunger) and the oppression by the wealthy ruling British class, to colonization and the clash between old beliefs and the emergence of Catholicism, Land covers a bit of everything in Ireland’s long, rich history.
Maggie O’Farrell paints a vivid portrait that in her true form is filled with lyrical prose that's nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful. In my opinion, what makes a good book is one that's not only well written but also unforgettable. Land is one of those captivating journeys that sits with the reader long after finishing it.
Land was my number one most anticipated read of the year and it exceeded all of my expectations! I learned so much while reading Land, so much so that I’ll never think of Ireland the same after finishing.
I listened to the audiobook version which is read by Dane Whyte O’Hara who did a brilliant job bringing this compelling story to life. If you decide to pick this one up, I highly recommend this format.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell will be available on June 2. Many thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for the gifted audiobook!
Land is an epic saga that is essentially the story of Ireland. Maggie delves into the Green Isles' rich history and the people who have inhabited the land over the centuries. From the potato famine (the great hunger) and the oppression by the wealthy ruling British class, to colonization and the clash between old beliefs and the emergence of Catholicism, Land covers a bit of everything in Ireland’s long, rich history.
Maggie O’Farrell paints a vivid portrait that in her true form is filled with lyrical prose that's nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful. In my opinion, what makes a good book is one that's not only well written but also unforgettable. Land is one of those captivating journeys that sits with the reader long after finishing it.
Land was my number one most anticipated read of the year and it exceeded all of my expectations! I learned so much while reading Land, so much so that I’ll never think of Ireland the same after finishing.
I listened to the audiobook version which is read by Dane Whyte O’Hara who did a brilliant job bringing this compelling story to life. If you decide to pick this one up, I highly recommend this format.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell will be available on June 2. Many thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for the gifted audiobook!
August 30, 2026
You know, as I do, that was another day that changed everything.
I had this novel on my hold list at my local library and was surprised to get it so quickly (published June 2nd). Maggie O’Farrell sets up a tale about a mapmaker, Tomás, in 1865 on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. What I like most is how she builds the characters and relationships of Tomas’s family, his wife, and children. They are like separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that she fits together to create a dynamic landscape of interweaving personalities. We see in particular how Liam’s identity revolves around his struggles with his father. Tomás wants his son to follow in his steps as a mapmaker. Mapmaking was an identity that Tomás fully embodied. It enabled his rise from poverty, and he sees it as powerful. He also sees it as a way to resist British occupiers, the very men for whom he works for the Ordnance Survey project.
I am making my own map. I will never cede to their version of geography, of history, of linguistics and toponomy.
Isn’t this a characteristic that most of us have? The desire to walk our own path, not one that’s pocked with the false narratives of others. To draw our own maps is an act of affirmation. Sometimes we have to walk the path to know what it is, where it leads.
O’Farrell dips from the present of 1865 back into Tomás’s childhood, and carries us along lightly, birds riding on the feathery wings of her writing. Her transitions are so smooth, we fly from one point in time to another. Sometimes her prose is so beautiful, I float in an airy dream, not wanting to move on, but hover over a scene, a hummingbird sipping the bittersweet that locks me into the emotional life of Tomás as a young boy, his dreams, the nature of his creativity, his longings. Tomás doesn’t remember the years of the Great Hunger while he is living at the workhouse, but he is planning with all that is within him to escape. He is an adult when the haunting memories resurface and exact harrowing consequences.
A taciturn man, Tomás is haunted by the ghosts of his past, even before remembering who those ghosts were. His wife also came through the Great Hunger and lost a mother and many siblings, a father who disappeared. They are cut off from their past, from parental love and support, but together they love their children the best that they can. From these lonely parents, O’Farrell fashions a family. She sculpts them all with words. Enda is the firstborn, a year older than Liam. She wishes to be acknowledged as smart and capable as her brother, Liam. Then, there is Rose, a beauty who shadows all her mother’s steps and becomes the keeper of the hearth. Lastly, a baby boy, who seems to soak the land up into his being.
This is a story about how we are molded by families and circumstance, by the land we love and live upon. I thought about how my own experiences with the land shaped me; about how the homes we lived in, and the homes we left behind, had made their mark. My sister and I were much like Enda and Rose, in a time before the internet and too much TV, in love with trees and creeks, dogs, dolls, and playhouses in the woods, always pretending and loving every minute of it. This wonderful book took me to Ireland in 1865 and the years when Tomás’s family was growing up, and it took me back to my past, my own relationship with the land.
This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud. Its existence here, on the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.
I had this novel on my hold list at my local library and was surprised to get it so quickly (published June 2nd). Maggie O’Farrell sets up a tale about a mapmaker, Tomás, in 1865 on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. What I like most is how she builds the characters and relationships of Tomas’s family, his wife, and children. They are like separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that she fits together to create a dynamic landscape of interweaving personalities. We see in particular how Liam’s identity revolves around his struggles with his father. Tomás wants his son to follow in his steps as a mapmaker. Mapmaking was an identity that Tomás fully embodied. It enabled his rise from poverty, and he sees it as powerful. He also sees it as a way to resist British occupiers, the very men for whom he works for the Ordnance Survey project.
I am making my own map. I will never cede to their version of geography, of history, of linguistics and toponomy.
Isn’t this a characteristic that most of us have? The desire to walk our own path, not one that’s pocked with the false narratives of others. To draw our own maps is an act of affirmation. Sometimes we have to walk the path to know what it is, where it leads.
O’Farrell dips from the present of 1865 back into Tomás’s childhood, and carries us along lightly, birds riding on the feathery wings of her writing. Her transitions are so smooth, we fly from one point in time to another. Sometimes her prose is so beautiful, I float in an airy dream, not wanting to move on, but hover over a scene, a hummingbird sipping the bittersweet that locks me into the emotional life of Tomás as a young boy, his dreams, the nature of his creativity, his longings. Tomás doesn’t remember the years of the Great Hunger while he is living at the workhouse, but he is planning with all that is within him to escape. He is an adult when the haunting memories resurface and exact harrowing consequences.
A taciturn man, Tomás is haunted by the ghosts of his past, even before remembering who those ghosts were. His wife also came through the Great Hunger and lost a mother and many siblings, a father who disappeared. They are cut off from their past, from parental love and support, but together they love their children the best that they can. From these lonely parents, O’Farrell fashions a family. She sculpts them all with words. Enda is the firstborn, a year older than Liam. She wishes to be acknowledged as smart and capable as her brother, Liam. Then, there is Rose, a beauty who shadows all her mother’s steps and becomes the keeper of the hearth. Lastly, a baby boy, who seems to soak the land up into his being.
This is a story about how we are molded by families and circumstance, by the land we love and live upon. I thought about how my own experiences with the land shaped me; about how the homes we lived in, and the homes we left behind, had made their mark. My sister and I were much like Enda and Rose, in a time before the internet and too much TV, in love with trees and creeks, dogs, dolls, and playhouses in the woods, always pretending and loving every minute of it. This wonderful book took me to Ireland in 1865 and the years when Tomás’s family was growing up, and it took me back to my past, my own relationship with the land.
This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud. Its existence here, on the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.
July 20, 2026
This book made me tired.
I’ve read Marriage Portrait and Hamnet, wasn’t overly impressed by either one, and Land isn’t much different. SO much vast description, but this doesn’t equate to an easy, edge of my seat read. The prose will go from the past to the present in a single sentence, from a view point of a bird to the sky. And while I appreciate the depth, the characters and the storyline just never connected with me.
I forced myself to trudge (and skim) through it. I did enjoy the immigrant POV, as the entire premise (I think) is about colonization and the centuries of effects it has on individual families. Heartbreaking at times, but still a sludge to get through.
That being said, Maggie o’Farrell is for many people, and that is not me.
I’ve read Marriage Portrait and Hamnet, wasn’t overly impressed by either one, and Land isn’t much different. SO much vast description, but this doesn’t equate to an easy, edge of my seat read. The prose will go from the past to the present in a single sentence, from a view point of a bird to the sky. And while I appreciate the depth, the characters and the storyline just never connected with me.
I forced myself to trudge (and skim) through it. I did enjoy the immigrant POV, as the entire premise (I think) is about colonization and the centuries of effects it has on individual families. Heartbreaking at times, but still a sludge to get through.
That being said, Maggie o’Farrell is for many people, and that is not me.
June 20, 2026
Apparently Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is being dubbed one of the best books of 2026. Well, I have news for you: it isn’t.
And I want to be clear — I didn’t hate it. I didn’t dread picking it up. It’s fine. Perfectly okay. But “fine” and “best of 2026” are two very different things, and the gap between this novel’s reputation and the actual experience of reading it kept nagging at me until I figured out why.
The material is genuinely interesting. It’s 1865, post-Famine Ireland. Tomás is a mapmaker working for the British Army — an Irishman helping the colonizers erase his own country’s history one anglicized place name at a time. His ten year old son Liam is his apprentice. Then Tomás drinks from a hidden spring in an unmapped copse and comes completely undone. He wears a crown of leaves. He denounces his colonial work. He declares he’ll create a secret true map of the land’s ancient history. A priest arrives, ties him to a table, and tortures him with starvation and prayer until he breaks. Liam finishes the army’s maps alone to secure payment and walks his shattered, silent father back to Dublin.
That’s a novel. Those are stakes. That father-son dynamic — Liam terrified, loyal, quietly furious, watching his father get destroyed by the Church while he finishes the very maps his father renounced — is exactly the kind of thing literary fiction exists to explore. When O’Farrell stays inside that tension the book deserves every bit of its praise.
But then she doesn’t trust it.
Take Tomás’s transformation at the spring. It’s the novel’s inciting event, its central mystery. Did the land itself reach up and change him? Is this madness? Is it vision? That ambiguity should be doing enormous work throughout the entire book. Except at a certain point Phina, his wife, asks him gently whether his old melancholy might be returning. His old melancholy. Meaning this isn’t the first time. Meaning the family has navigated this before. O’Farrell probably intended that as a quiet, tender moment of marital intimacy — a wife who knows her husband. What it actually does is accidentally deflate the novel’s entire mythic engine. The sacred spring, the exorcism, the visions, the obsession — and the man’s wife is essentially asking if he needs to lie down for a bit. Either the spring is real and transformative or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
And that’s the novel’s fundamental problem in miniature. It wants two contradictory things at once.
Liam is the best example. Here is a character with a genuinely rich internal conflict — a son manipulated into the priesthood by a man who resents his father, slowly losing the faith he was groomed to have, thousands of miles from home in India when he learns Tomás is dead. That is a novel’s worth of material on its own. But O’Farrell gets bored with it. Rather than doing the hard work of dramatizing Liam’s psychology from the inside, she literally replaces him — his sister Enda steals his emigration papers, cuts her hair, dresses as a man, and sails to Canada in his place. Liam gets a few pages in India and an off-stage crisis of faith. Enda gets the adventure. It’s not a bold structural choice. It’s avoidance. O’Farrell took a compelling character with a genuine internal conflict and decided two people could share the role instead of one person having to carry it.
The novel keeps pulling away from what’s working to flash back to Tomás’s childhood in the workhouse, to an ancient girl named Brith sacrificed at the same spring millennia ago, to historical interludes about the Famine, the Vikings, the dissolution of the monasteries. Some of this pays off. The Brith material has real mythic weight. But O’Farrell signals every connection so heavily — the parallels between Brith and the family, the maps as colonialism, the land remembering — that the reader never gets to feel smart. You get told the answer before you’ve asked the question. Father Joseph grooms Liam for the priesthood as revenge against Tomás — and O’Farrell just tells you that, flat out, instead of letting you watch the manipulation and arrive there yourself. That’s the whole disease in one sentence.
Family sagas can work without a single protagonist. But only when the structure itself is the point. Here it reads less like a deliberate formal choice and more like O’Farrell following whoever interested her that week, handing off the burden of the story whenever it gets hard.
The novel has the shape of a major literary achievement — vast scope, mythic resonance, Big Themes about colonialism and land and faith. Critics respond to the shape. But the execution doesn’t match it. Too strange and sprawling to be a satisfying page-turner. Too anxious and explanatory to be genuine formal daring. A book that looks like it’s doing something difficult while actually doing something much safer.
Pick one, and commit.
And I want to be clear — I didn’t hate it. I didn’t dread picking it up. It’s fine. Perfectly okay. But “fine” and “best of 2026” are two very different things, and the gap between this novel’s reputation and the actual experience of reading it kept nagging at me until I figured out why.
The material is genuinely interesting. It’s 1865, post-Famine Ireland. Tomás is a mapmaker working for the British Army — an Irishman helping the colonizers erase his own country’s history one anglicized place name at a time. His ten year old son Liam is his apprentice. Then Tomás drinks from a hidden spring in an unmapped copse and comes completely undone. He wears a crown of leaves. He denounces his colonial work. He declares he’ll create a secret true map of the land’s ancient history. A priest arrives, ties him to a table, and tortures him with starvation and prayer until he breaks. Liam finishes the army’s maps alone to secure payment and walks his shattered, silent father back to Dublin.
That’s a novel. Those are stakes. That father-son dynamic — Liam terrified, loyal, quietly furious, watching his father get destroyed by the Church while he finishes the very maps his father renounced — is exactly the kind of thing literary fiction exists to explore. When O’Farrell stays inside that tension the book deserves every bit of its praise.
But then she doesn’t trust it.
Take Tomás’s transformation at the spring. It’s the novel’s inciting event, its central mystery. Did the land itself reach up and change him? Is this madness? Is it vision? That ambiguity should be doing enormous work throughout the entire book. Except at a certain point Phina, his wife, asks him gently whether his old melancholy might be returning. His old melancholy. Meaning this isn’t the first time. Meaning the family has navigated this before. O’Farrell probably intended that as a quiet, tender moment of marital intimacy — a wife who knows her husband. What it actually does is accidentally deflate the novel’s entire mythic engine. The sacred spring, the exorcism, the visions, the obsession — and the man’s wife is essentially asking if he needs to lie down for a bit. Either the spring is real and transformative or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
And that’s the novel’s fundamental problem in miniature. It wants two contradictory things at once.
Liam is the best example. Here is a character with a genuinely rich internal conflict — a son manipulated into the priesthood by a man who resents his father, slowly losing the faith he was groomed to have, thousands of miles from home in India when he learns Tomás is dead. That is a novel’s worth of material on its own. But O’Farrell gets bored with it. Rather than doing the hard work of dramatizing Liam’s psychology from the inside, she literally replaces him — his sister Enda steals his emigration papers, cuts her hair, dresses as a man, and sails to Canada in his place. Liam gets a few pages in India and an off-stage crisis of faith. Enda gets the adventure. It’s not a bold structural choice. It’s avoidance. O’Farrell took a compelling character with a genuine internal conflict and decided two people could share the role instead of one person having to carry it.
The novel keeps pulling away from what’s working to flash back to Tomás’s childhood in the workhouse, to an ancient girl named Brith sacrificed at the same spring millennia ago, to historical interludes about the Famine, the Vikings, the dissolution of the monasteries. Some of this pays off. The Brith material has real mythic weight. But O’Farrell signals every connection so heavily — the parallels between Brith and the family, the maps as colonialism, the land remembering — that the reader never gets to feel smart. You get told the answer before you’ve asked the question. Father Joseph grooms Liam for the priesthood as revenge against Tomás — and O’Farrell just tells you that, flat out, instead of letting you watch the manipulation and arrive there yourself. That’s the whole disease in one sentence.
Family sagas can work without a single protagonist. But only when the structure itself is the point. Here it reads less like a deliberate formal choice and more like O’Farrell following whoever interested her that week, handing off the burden of the story whenever it gets hard.
The novel has the shape of a major literary achievement — vast scope, mythic resonance, Big Themes about colonialism and land and faith. Critics respond to the shape. But the execution doesn’t match it. Too strange and sprawling to be a satisfying page-turner. Too anxious and explanatory to be genuine formal daring. A book that looks like it’s doing something difficult while actually doing something much safer.
Pick one, and commit.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 23, 2026
Maggie O’Farrell has written a novel that is both a paean and a dirge to a land, a culture and a history. Her lush evocative prose elevates the land to a sentient being that emits emotions of joy, outrage and heartbreak. These elements create a narrative that extols resilience and the world’s natural majesty while excoriating the debilitating effects of colonial rule. This reading experience blends history and realism with a touch of folklore and mystery.
When land and history are involved, maps inevitably become a pivotal instrument that tie the two together. Maps have often been called the eyes of history and are the antennae that chronicle both change and continuity in world events.Maps reflect social values and shifts in power. The drawing and redrawing of borders on a map are a visual record of conquest and territorial control throughout time.
It is not surprising then that O’Farrell has chosen the family of a mapmaker to serve as the focal point that unfolds Ireland’s struggles under British rule.We meet Tomas in 1865. He is a surveyor and cartographer who has been hired by the British to map the terrain in the aftermath of the devastation wrought by the Potato Famine over the past twenty five years. Tomas, along with his ten year old son Liam, trods the land on the west coast of Ireland. The area has been ravaged by British neglect during the famine and towns,villages and cottages have disappeared, a silent elegy to the violence and injustice that has beset the region.Tomas is not well pleased to be employed by the British but realizes that his family must survive. Nevertheless, he silently bristles at the arrogance of the ruling class in excluding abandoned communities and renaming terrain to suit England’s purpose.
One day, Tomas barrels into a thicket in search of one of Liam’s boots. Inside the bushes, he discovers a small pool of water which transforms him from taciturn to wildly verbose. Tomas has become a changed man and informs Liam that everything is now different. He will henceforth craft maps that tell the true story of Ireland . It is not clear how this copse transformed Tomas. Might the copse been merely a spring of water? Or a “ faerie” well? Or a portal for time travel? What is clear is that Tomas’ encounter in the copse diverts the narrative path from strictly historical and sends it careening into past and future realms, introducing snippets of mystery and magic realism as an overlay to the main storyline.
In this way, the novel connects the world as we know it to Celtic legend and folklore. We become immersed in a panorama of Irish history, reaching back to the times when human sacrifice was a palliative to the gods and extending forward into the twentieth century. Embedded in this framework is the story of Irish diaspora augmented by prose that infuses history with the scents, sights and feeling of both oppression and fortitude.
The novel contains an epigraph defining the word seanchai as a custodian of tradition and reciter of ancient lore. This epigraph is a guidepost to remind us that ultimately, LAND is about feeling and emotion more so than facts and linear progression.For me, LAND is an example of oral storytelling.It is a reminder that we are a small part of the natural world and spend our lives attempting to unravel its mysteries.
When land and history are involved, maps inevitably become a pivotal instrument that tie the two together. Maps have often been called the eyes of history and are the antennae that chronicle both change and continuity in world events.Maps reflect social values and shifts in power. The drawing and redrawing of borders on a map are a visual record of conquest and territorial control throughout time.
It is not surprising then that O’Farrell has chosen the family of a mapmaker to serve as the focal point that unfolds Ireland’s struggles under British rule.We meet Tomas in 1865. He is a surveyor and cartographer who has been hired by the British to map the terrain in the aftermath of the devastation wrought by the Potato Famine over the past twenty five years. Tomas, along with his ten year old son Liam, trods the land on the west coast of Ireland. The area has been ravaged by British neglect during the famine and towns,villages and cottages have disappeared, a silent elegy to the violence and injustice that has beset the region.Tomas is not well pleased to be employed by the British but realizes that his family must survive. Nevertheless, he silently bristles at the arrogance of the ruling class in excluding abandoned communities and renaming terrain to suit England’s purpose.
One day, Tomas barrels into a thicket in search of one of Liam’s boots. Inside the bushes, he discovers a small pool of water which transforms him from taciturn to wildly verbose. Tomas has become a changed man and informs Liam that everything is now different. He will henceforth craft maps that tell the true story of Ireland . It is not clear how this copse transformed Tomas. Might the copse been merely a spring of water? Or a “ faerie” well? Or a portal for time travel? What is clear is that Tomas’ encounter in the copse diverts the narrative path from strictly historical and sends it careening into past and future realms, introducing snippets of mystery and magic realism as an overlay to the main storyline.
In this way, the novel connects the world as we know it to Celtic legend and folklore. We become immersed in a panorama of Irish history, reaching back to the times when human sacrifice was a palliative to the gods and extending forward into the twentieth century. Embedded in this framework is the story of Irish diaspora augmented by prose that infuses history with the scents, sights and feeling of both oppression and fortitude.
The novel contains an epigraph defining the word seanchai as a custodian of tradition and reciter of ancient lore. This epigraph is a guidepost to remind us that ultimately, LAND is about feeling and emotion more so than facts and linear progression.For me, LAND is an example of oral storytelling.It is a reminder that we are a small part of the natural world and spend our lives attempting to unravel its mysteries.
Read
August 29, 2026RTC.
August 17, 2026
It's the kind of book you wish you could somehow read again for the first time...
July 31, 2026
This may well be my favourite book of 2026.
I always find it difficult to review a novel I completely fell in love with, because it's such a different experience from simply liking or disliking a book for specific reasons. It's more of a deep emotional connection you form with the story, and that's exactly what happened here.
I adored this lush, atmospheric and sweeping novel, which tells the story of Ireland through the lives of one unforgettable family. Every character felt fully realised and entirely unique, and I became invested in each of them.
I also love magical realism, so I especially appreciated how Maggie O'Farrell weaves folklore into the story. As one character says, "...myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself." The way she blurs the lines between myth and reality—whether through enchanted waters or the loss of faith—feels completely natural and adds another layer of magic to an already extraordinary novel.
What impressed me most was the sheer scope of the story. It spans countries, politics, nature and history, yet never loses sight of the family at its heart. Everything comes together so seamlessly that it creates a truly immersive and unforgettable reading experience.
This is one of those rare books that I know will stay with me for a very long time.
I always find it difficult to review a novel I completely fell in love with, because it's such a different experience from simply liking or disliking a book for specific reasons. It's more of a deep emotional connection you form with the story, and that's exactly what happened here.
I adored this lush, atmospheric and sweeping novel, which tells the story of Ireland through the lives of one unforgettable family. Every character felt fully realised and entirely unique, and I became invested in each of them.
I also love magical realism, so I especially appreciated how Maggie O'Farrell weaves folklore into the story. As one character says, "...myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself." The way she blurs the lines between myth and reality—whether through enchanted waters or the loss of faith—feels completely natural and adds another layer of magic to an already extraordinary novel.
What impressed me most was the sheer scope of the story. It spans countries, politics, nature and history, yet never loses sight of the family at its heart. Everything comes together so seamlessly that it creates a truly immersive and unforgettable reading experience.
This is one of those rare books that I know will stay with me for a very long time.
June 5, 2026
Honestly this one is probably on me.
I can’t follow this to save my life, I listened to it on audiobook WHILE holding and reading the physical copy. It’s deep, lyrical, character driven. I just keep zoning out.
Again, I know this about myself. I just got so much fomo with all the rave reviews.
I’ll see myself out.
I can’t follow this to save my life, I listened to it on audiobook WHILE holding and reading the physical copy. It’s deep, lyrical, character driven. I just keep zoning out.
Again, I know this about myself. I just got so much fomo with all the rave reviews.
I’ll see myself out.
June 23, 2026
Its mysticism solves the problem of being too obvious that is present in Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, but the story is less convincing here than in those novels. The book is desperate to find a clear message.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Received ARC from Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This is a book I respected more than I enjoyed. Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is beautiful and immersive, with a strong sense of place and thoughtful themes around history, memory, and loss. The land itself feels alive, which is one of the novel’s biggest strengths.
The character development is complex and well done, but emotionally it never quite worked for me. Even with richly drawn characters, I struggled to feel connected to any of them.
This book was hard to get through. The pacing is slow and demanding, and while that suits the reflective tone, it made the reading experience feel like effort rather than engagement.
For me, it was a solid but challenging read that didn’t fully land.
This is a book I respected more than I enjoyed. Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is beautiful and immersive, with a strong sense of place and thoughtful themes around history, memory, and loss. The land itself feels alive, which is one of the novel’s biggest strengths.
The character development is complex and well done, but emotionally it never quite worked for me. Even with richly drawn characters, I struggled to feel connected to any of them.
This book was hard to get through. The pacing is slow and demanding, and while that suits the reflective tone, it made the reading experience feel like effort rather than engagement.
For me, it was a solid but challenging read that didn’t fully land.
September 3, 2026
3.5-3.75-
This one was a bit trickier to rate. It’s long, somber, and deeply detailed—part folklore, part quiet family saga. It traces the arc of a family across generations, from the parents’ early love to their children growing up, alongside the poignant histories of those who inhabited the land before them. It is heavy with themes of loss, loneliness, and finality. Quite grim and undeniably sad, it left an ache in my chest. Yet, it is so beautifully written that I completely see why so many readers adore this author.
This one was a bit trickier to rate. It’s long, somber, and deeply detailed—part folklore, part quiet family saga. It traces the arc of a family across generations, from the parents’ early love to their children growing up, alongside the poignant histories of those who inhabited the land before them. It is heavy with themes of loss, loneliness, and finality. Quite grim and undeniably sad, it left an ache in my chest. Yet, it is so beautifully written that I completely see why so many readers adore this author.
January 12, 2026
Immersive and atmospheric, this magnificent novel took me on a journey through time as the fate of one Irish family is woven through the history and geography of the land on which they make their home. In a story that spans from Nordic invaders to English colonization, from the Great Famine to Canadian emigration, from the far-reaches of British empire to the source of a supernatural well, O'Farrell's gorgeous prose and rich descriptions gave me a visceral sense of Ireland's wonders and woes.
July 27, 2026
4.5-stars, rounded up.
The land in question is Ireland, and the Great Hunger has recently ended as the book begins. Tomás and his son, Liam, are surveying the land for the British when Tomás discovers an ancient copse and natural well, where the spirit of the land’s history and meaning overwhelm him. So opens a tale that becomes a history lesson and a family saga.
Tomás knew that if he were to survey this copse, to record it upon the map, within weeks, perhaps even days, the viscount would send up a party of men to fell all these trees for timber, to divert the water for use in the manor house, and that would be that. This woodland, which had been here since the beginning of time, would be gone, claimed, erased.
Maggie O’Farrell does what Maggie O’Farrell always does; she reduces the complicated to something simple and expands the simple into something profound. This is the story of a land and a heritage, but it is also the story of a family and the individuals that make it up, and at some point the reader realizes that the two are the same.
O’Farrell addresses a life that few of us could have any tangible firsthand knowledge of, but within that life we find elements of our own experiences and feelings. This, I believe, is what makes her great.
It is seven months now since Tomás passed, which feels to Rose like no time at all and yet an endless stretch of days. Death baffles her, every time she brushes against it: the finality of it, how there is no bargaining to be done, no way of saying to it, If I give you this or do that you must give my mother or father back to me, release them from your clutches. It is the inarguable force of their absence, and the conundrum of what to do with what they leave behind: the boots, the combs full of strands, the spoon worn smooth by their fingers, the shawl draped on a chair, the bonnet on the peg.
I became very involved in each of the characters and felt a kind of anguish when the narrative progressed from one generation to the next. Woven into the stories of the current occupants of the Land are the stories of its history and those who preceded them by centuries. The theme that stood out beyond all others was how we are connected one to another by our family, by our shared origins, and by our dependence on and love of the land.
I could not help thinking how my own land has changed in just my short lifetime. How the rural farms of my youth are now paved over with concrete and how little of my father’s world is still evident in my own. Does the land eventually win? Do the simple people, those closest to it, prevail? In many ways, this book seems to say yes it does and they can, but there is a price and the price is high and often what is lost is never regained.
I admire and adore Maggie O’Farrell’s writing. She is a skilled storyteller and a profound thinker. Her books always feel like a gift to me. This one was no exception.
The land in question is Ireland, and the Great Hunger has recently ended as the book begins. Tomás and his son, Liam, are surveying the land for the British when Tomás discovers an ancient copse and natural well, where the spirit of the land’s history and meaning overwhelm him. So opens a tale that becomes a history lesson and a family saga.
Tomás knew that if he were to survey this copse, to record it upon the map, within weeks, perhaps even days, the viscount would send up a party of men to fell all these trees for timber, to divert the water for use in the manor house, and that would be that. This woodland, which had been here since the beginning of time, would be gone, claimed, erased.
Maggie O’Farrell does what Maggie O’Farrell always does; she reduces the complicated to something simple and expands the simple into something profound. This is the story of a land and a heritage, but it is also the story of a family and the individuals that make it up, and at some point the reader realizes that the two are the same.
O’Farrell addresses a life that few of us could have any tangible firsthand knowledge of, but within that life we find elements of our own experiences and feelings. This, I believe, is what makes her great.
It is seven months now since Tomás passed, which feels to Rose like no time at all and yet an endless stretch of days. Death baffles her, every time she brushes against it: the finality of it, how there is no bargaining to be done, no way of saying to it, If I give you this or do that you must give my mother or father back to me, release them from your clutches. It is the inarguable force of their absence, and the conundrum of what to do with what they leave behind: the boots, the combs full of strands, the spoon worn smooth by their fingers, the shawl draped on a chair, the bonnet on the peg.
I became very involved in each of the characters and felt a kind of anguish when the narrative progressed from one generation to the next. Woven into the stories of the current occupants of the Land are the stories of its history and those who preceded them by centuries. The theme that stood out beyond all others was how we are connected one to another by our family, by our shared origins, and by our dependence on and love of the land.
I could not help thinking how my own land has changed in just my short lifetime. How the rural farms of my youth are now paved over with concrete and how little of my father’s world is still evident in my own. Does the land eventually win? Do the simple people, those closest to it, prevail? In many ways, this book seems to say yes it does and they can, but there is a price and the price is high and often what is lost is never regained.
I admire and adore Maggie O’Farrell’s writing. She is a skilled storyteller and a profound thinker. Her books always feel like a gift to me. This one was no exception.
July 13, 2026
My first Maggie O’Farrell, but it won’t be my last! Sheer perfection, I loved every bit of it.
June 10, 2026
2.5⭐️ Having read and loved everything O’Farrell has written up to this point and rushed out to get my copy on release day, it really pains me to say that this was a huge disappointment. Of course it’s beautifully written as you would expect, but that just isn’t enough to make up for how slow and dull this is. For whatever reason I couldn’t really connect with any of the characters which meant that when tragedies occurred, I wasn’t really moved by them. The pacing was so slow that I really had to push hard to keep going with this and if it was anyone other than O’Farrell I would have DNF’d after 100 pages. Clearly I am an outlier here as this has some amazing reviews but sadly this just didn’t engage me at all.
August 7, 2026
Land is a signature Maggie O'Farrell blend of historical fiction, literary fiction, and generational family saga. The novel starts in Ireland, 1865, with the country recovering from the Great Famine. With so many inhabitants gone, the British are keen to remap Ireland, hiring an Irish mapmaker, Tomás and his son, to chart a remote western peninsula. From there, we meet the rest of the family, seeing how their luck goes from bad to worse, leading to deaths, betrayal, and a scattering of members.
We see the past of Tomas and Phina, his wife, through memories of the early chapters. Together, they had four children- Liam, Edna, Rose, and Eugene. Magical realism is woven in as Tomás and Liam encounter a mystical copse, and Tomás emerges as a completely different person. But when he emerges, it is not so easy on the family. He moves them all to the rural peninsula, wanting to make his own map, not in the way of the British orders.
Through hardship, we see the family of six change. As the kids grow, they expand beyond Ireland; Liam as a Jesuit missionary in India and daughter Enda as a laborer in Quebec. The stories interweave and separate, unfolding across the decades.
It was hard to exactly trail the plot of this novel. The synopsis, which described Tomas and the encounter in the copse, happens so early in the novel that it never seemed like a turning point. Even though the magical realism was established to be such a central part of the story, it never felt striking. A big component of how I enjoy historical works is their foundation. Maggie O'Farrell pulled from her great-great-grandfather, who researched the second revision of the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland. It reflects on colonial mapping and captures the Great Famine and mass emigration from Ireland. However, much creative license is used, and this did come across more of a literary fiction work.
I cannot say I was enthralled throughout the novel's entirety. I find that Maggie O'Farrell always begins with the most interesting premise then draws it out with unneeded details. The story started to read too slowly, making me lose interest in the siblings. The plot seemed to lack direction, with a parade of hardships thrown in. I did get a sense of her sweeping storytelling, though I felt that the story lacked a true vision. Her writing is beautiful, setting the scene in such vivid manner. But as a whole, the novel was hard to stay attuned to.
We see the past of Tomas and Phina, his wife, through memories of the early chapters. Together, they had four children- Liam, Edna, Rose, and Eugene. Magical realism is woven in as Tomás and Liam encounter a mystical copse, and Tomás emerges as a completely different person. But when he emerges, it is not so easy on the family. He moves them all to the rural peninsula, wanting to make his own map, not in the way of the British orders.
Through hardship, we see the family of six change. As the kids grow, they expand beyond Ireland; Liam as a Jesuit missionary in India and daughter Enda as a laborer in Quebec. The stories interweave and separate, unfolding across the decades.
It was hard to exactly trail the plot of this novel. The synopsis, which described Tomas and the encounter in the copse, happens so early in the novel that it never seemed like a turning point. Even though the magical realism was established to be such a central part of the story, it never felt striking. A big component of how I enjoy historical works is their foundation. Maggie O'Farrell pulled from her great-great-grandfather, who researched the second revision of the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland. It reflects on colonial mapping and captures the Great Famine and mass emigration from Ireland. However, much creative license is used, and this did come across more of a literary fiction work.
I cannot say I was enthralled throughout the novel's entirety. I find that Maggie O'Farrell always begins with the most interesting premise then draws it out with unneeded details. The story started to read too slowly, making me lose interest in the siblings. The plot seemed to lack direction, with a parade of hardships thrown in. I did get a sense of her sweeping storytelling, though I felt that the story lacked a true vision. Her writing is beautiful, setting the scene in such vivid manner. But as a whole, the novel was hard to stay attuned to.
August 25, 2026
When we die, we surrender our bodies to the earth and we become earth,” Tomás says. “It is the end of one story but the beginning of another.
“Terra”, uma verdadeira ode à Irlanda e ao sentimento de pertença, abre com uma liberdade poética, chamemos-lhe assim, ao afirmar que a acção decorre no ponto mais ocidental da Europa, e fecha com um inesperado momento de realismo mágico após uma revelação inverosímil com o intuito de reforçar a ideia de apego às raízes.
As he walks closer and closer, things look at once familiar and strange. The estate wall seems lower than he remembers, its stones thick leaf-rot. (…) Liam is simultaneously disoriented and certain of where he is: he is adrift, he is home; this place is both in him and out of him. And the question keeps tolling through his mind: who is he here, if none of his people are left?
Este romance histórico, marcado pelo colonialismo inglês, pela pobreza e pela emigração, inicia-se em 1865, mais de uma década depois da Grande Fome que atingiu a ilha, dizimando cerca de 25% da população, uma catástrofe não só natural mas também sociopolítica vivida por Tomás e Phina, dois órfãos que assistiram à morte de todos os membros das suas famílias, formando a sua própria alguns anos depois de se conhecerem num orfanato, sem nunca superarem esse trauma, cujos vestígios ainda são visíveis em zonas agora desertificadas.
These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now. Tomás must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain; he must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates, which have been emptied and dismantles. The redcoats turn their eyes from this task; they prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered. They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances. Tomás has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened, what was lost, if it kills him.
Aliando a vertente mítica à faceta mística da Ilha Esmeralda, Maggie O’Farrell burila uma saga familiar que acompanha este casal e os seus quatro filhos, cada um simbolizando um elemento importante da cultura irlandesa.
Liam, o filho mais velho que assiste a um exorcismo em pequeno, representa a religião e o seu lado obscurantista.
It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow.”
Enda, a filha rebelde que não se conforma com a diferença de tratamento por ser rapariga, encarna a música, alcançando alguma liberdade através do seu violino.
The music she plays is the land: it summons it; it conjures it here, to this street corner. It is enough to drive her mad. How can she be here and there, all at the same time? She is a person divided, split in two, a tree sundered by lightening.
Rose, a filha cuidadora da casa, dos campos e dos animais, incluindo um magnífico e leal Irish Wolfhound, personifica os laços familiares e o aspecto telúrico da ilha.
Rose straightens, pressing a fist to her back. She is filled with sudden and baseless fear, a chill water welling inside her. She is lacking too much; she is unprotected; there aren’t enough of them to be safe. She wants people, her people, around her; she wants walls, high ones, to keep out the ravening night, the baying enemies.
Por fim, Eugene, uma criança não-verbal no espectro do autismo, equivaleria ao changeling, a figura que, segundo o folclore irlandês, as fadas trocam pelo bebé verdadeiro.
Eugene puts his hand over his ears, surveying the scene. Rose’s leaking eyes; Enda’s range; his father making the horrible sound. He cannot parse this situation; he cannot phantom these various behaviours, what I all means, what might be expected of him. The only possible course of action is to make himself disappear, to occupy the smallest space imaginable. He climbs the ladder to the loft, lifts the lid to a chest and wedges himself in next to the blankets kept there.
Ao longo de 400 páginas que, por vezes, se arrastam um pouco e parecem fruto de algum improviso, assiste-se a um rol de desgraças que tornam a obra demasiado melodramática, mas que não deixam de comprovar aquele que para mim é o maior dom de O’Farrell: a empatia que me permite criar com as suas personagens, levando-me a condoer profundamente com o destino de cada uma delas.
“Terra”, uma verdadeira ode à Irlanda e ao sentimento de pertença, abre com uma liberdade poética, chamemos-lhe assim, ao afirmar que a acção decorre no ponto mais ocidental da Europa, e fecha com um inesperado momento de realismo mágico após uma revelação inverosímil com o intuito de reforçar a ideia de apego às raízes.
As he walks closer and closer, things look at once familiar and strange. The estate wall seems lower than he remembers, its stones thick leaf-rot. (…) Liam is simultaneously disoriented and certain of where he is: he is adrift, he is home; this place is both in him and out of him. And the question keeps tolling through his mind: who is he here, if none of his people are left?
Este romance histórico, marcado pelo colonialismo inglês, pela pobreza e pela emigração, inicia-se em 1865, mais de uma década depois da Grande Fome que atingiu a ilha, dizimando cerca de 25% da população, uma catástrofe não só natural mas também sociopolítica vivida por Tomás e Phina, dois órfãos que assistiram à morte de todos os membros das suas famílias, formando a sua própria alguns anos depois de se conhecerem num orfanato, sem nunca superarem esse trauma, cujos vestígios ainda são visíveis em zonas agora desertificadas.
These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now. Tomás must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain; he must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates, which have been emptied and dismantles. The redcoats turn their eyes from this task; they prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered. They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances. Tomás has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened, what was lost, if it kills him.
Aliando a vertente mítica à faceta mística da Ilha Esmeralda, Maggie O’Farrell burila uma saga familiar que acompanha este casal e os seus quatro filhos, cada um simbolizando um elemento importante da cultura irlandesa.
Liam, o filho mais velho que assiste a um exorcismo em pequeno, representa a religião e o seu lado obscurantista.
It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow.”
Enda, a filha rebelde que não se conforma com a diferença de tratamento por ser rapariga, encarna a música, alcançando alguma liberdade através do seu violino.
The music she plays is the land: it summons it; it conjures it here, to this street corner. It is enough to drive her mad. How can she be here and there, all at the same time? She is a person divided, split in two, a tree sundered by lightening.
Rose, a filha cuidadora da casa, dos campos e dos animais, incluindo um magnífico e leal Irish Wolfhound, personifica os laços familiares e o aspecto telúrico da ilha.
Rose straightens, pressing a fist to her back. She is filled with sudden and baseless fear, a chill water welling inside her. She is lacking too much; she is unprotected; there aren’t enough of them to be safe. She wants people, her people, around her; she wants walls, high ones, to keep out the ravening night, the baying enemies.
Por fim, Eugene, uma criança não-verbal no espectro do autismo, equivaleria ao changeling, a figura que, segundo o folclore irlandês, as fadas trocam pelo bebé verdadeiro.
Eugene puts his hand over his ears, surveying the scene. Rose’s leaking eyes; Enda’s range; his father making the horrible sound. He cannot parse this situation; he cannot phantom these various behaviours, what I all means, what might be expected of him. The only possible course of action is to make himself disappear, to occupy the smallest space imaginable. He climbs the ladder to the loft, lifts the lid to a chest and wedges himself in next to the blankets kept there.
Ao longo de 400 páginas que, por vezes, se arrastam um pouco e parecem fruto de algum improviso, assiste-se a um rol de desgraças que tornam a obra demasiado melodramática, mas que não deixam de comprovar aquele que para mim é o maior dom de O’Farrell: a empatia que me permite criar com as suas personagens, levando-me a condoer profundamente com o destino de cada uma delas.
August 7, 2026
“His father was a man of few words.”
And so begins the epic saga Land by Maggie O’Farrell, set in the aftermath of the Irish famine, on a rainswept Irish peninsula as it tells the story of two generations as well as alluding to two more generations both before and after. In 1865, on this windswept peninsula stretching out to the Atlantic, Tomas and his reluctant 10-year old son Liam, are working for the Great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The country had been ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger. Tomas is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. And it is on the promontory in a hidden and overgrown copse that Tomas discovers a scrap of tangled woodland clustered around an ancient well. And it will be woven among these characters lives the story of the prehistoric magic well carrying a flavor of Celtic mythology. This family will never be the same.
When Tomas is affected by the water in the magic well and beset by visions, he becomes opposed to working for the English. Liam sees that he must stop his father from destroying all of his work, and, somehow, Liam must present the finished work to the Redcoats for the promised salary to support the family. Phina, the young girl Tomas met in a workhouse and married is expecting their fourth child, Eugene. And there are Liam’s sisters; Enda, who is clever, and Rose, who is beautiful. There is a shifting point of view throughout the novel including the land itself as well as an omniscient perspective tying the stories together.
Land opens with an epigraph with the word seanchai. Its meaning in the book given as both “custodian of tradition, historian” and reciter of ancient lore; traditional storyteller.” Land is a beautiful book of storytelling. It is also a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. The land is also a main character in the book as it as spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it. Maggie O’Farrell has done it again with this epic book that will not soon be forgotten.
“When we die, we surrender our bodies to the earth and we become earth,” Tomas says. “It is the end of one story but the beginning of another.”
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