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 p13Maggie 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.
A child, a family, a play: ‘Hamnet’ by Maggie O’Farrell
First published in 2020, this historical novel by award-winning author Maggie O’Farrell is generating a resurgence of interest due to the release of the film adaptation in cinemas. I plan to see it soon and wanted to read the novel first; always my preference if possible, as the original book (in my opinion) always offers a richer, deeper story than a film can tell in its more time-limited format.
I wasn’t disappointed. As you can probably tell from its title, Hamnet is an imagining of the origin story of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. And what a rich, deep story it is.
The author focuses on the members of the playwright’s family, especially his wife, called Agnes in the book, and their three children, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. Shakespeare himself is, if anything, more of a secondary character, in that while his emotional arc is crucial to the story, he is never named and he comes and goes physically throughout, while the narrative centres on events in his home town and within his birth family and that of his wife.
I’m sure it is no spoiler to say that the crux of the novel is the death of Hamnet, still a child, and the effect this tragedy has on all concerned. The intense grief of the boy’s family, especially his parents and twin, is expressed in different ways by each individual. A family already under pressure, tested to breaking point, despite the deep love that exists there. Will this marriage survive? How does each person cope with the unimaginable but all too common tragedy of a child’s death? These are the questions that run through the book, keeping us engaged and committed.
The author has brought to brilliant life the Tudor-era setting: the sights, smells, daily lives in a quiet town like Stratford-on-Avon and in the busy, overwhelming city of London, where Hamnet’s father goes to pursue his quest for a career in the burgeoning world of Elizabethan theatre. Descriptions are deep, detailed, almost forensic: the journey of a single flea from a far off port, across land and oceans to the home where it bites Judith, resulting in her almost-death from bubonic plague and Hamnet’s subsequent illness, is startling in its specificity.
Within this vivid context the novel’s heart beats: love of a parent for their child, love of a twin for their paired sibling, love of a writer for their craft, love of a couple for their other.
And so a famous play was born: its story of overwhelming, maddening grief, echoing across the centuries to readers and theatre-goers today.
He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind (and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could have just gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him).
Hamnet ebook loc 254 of 310Hamnet was published by Tinder Press in 2020. I read the ebook version on Kindle.
The film adaptation is in cinemas as I write.
