Beautiful: ‘Land’ by Maggie O’Farrell

How can we understand the deep scars associated with trauma such as famine? Or the connections that people feel with their homeland – not the nation, but the actual piece of land on which they are born and raised?

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest work does this, as well as touching on Irish myth from deep time, incorporating a little ‘magical realism’ (for want of a better term), along with geography and history. All in one big, beautiful novel.

The description ‘family saga’ comes to mind as well, because the story encompasses the connections of a single family to a piece of land on a peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. The roots of the narrative reach back, far back to prehistory and myth, but the main protagonists first appear to the reader in 1865.

This is a time when the scars of the Great Hunger, the devastating potato blight and resulting famine of the 1840s, are still very much apparent, in all that is missing: people, houses, villages, crops. Tomás and his wife Phina meet as children in the orphanage, where they’d been taken after their families perish from hunger. Their origin stories are both beautiful and sorrowful.

Two decades later, they have young children of their own and Tomás is employed by the British to work on what was called the Ordnance Survey project, aimed at mapping the whole of Ireland, which had never been done before. He is a skilled cartographer though of course receives almost no recognition or proper payment for his abilities – British names sign off on his work and his status is ‘labourer’. Such is life in a colonised Ireland.

The book’s blurb describes what happens to Tomás while mapping the peninsula that forms so much of the novel’s backdrop as: an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. It is a hint of the coming dramas that will be visited on the family, and vague because readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what actually takes place in that secluded spot, though the results are very clearly tumultuous.

It is also where some of the book’s themes, such as the importance of land, and connection, and how the land and waters remember, are introduced. Every member of the family will grapple with these over their lives, with varying outcomes.

This beautiful and surprising book is full of gorgeous prose, vivid characters and especially, luminous and finely drawn landscapes:

A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irrregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land – and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where humans are unknown, where he is the only one, and will have to make the best of it.
Land p13

Maggie O’Farrell is fast becoming a favourite author for me. Land is a delight of a book.
It was published by Tinder Press in 2026.

You may be interested in my review of Hamnet, also by Maggie O’Farrell.

And here is a short clip of the author speaking about Land.