“Sometimes – rarely – there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page,” said Andrea Wulf in The New Statesman. “Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel ‘Land’ is such a book.”
Much of it is set on a peninsula on the western coast of Ireland in the 19th century, during and after the Great Famine. Tomás, an Irish mapmaker who works for the English Ordnance Survey, has a mystical experience there while drinking from a once-holy spring in a copse. There is a brief detour into the peninsula’s prehistory and history – druids, ritual sacrifice, the coming of Christianity, English colonisation – before O’Farrell returns to the 19th century and follows the story of Tomás, his wife and children. There is “regret, loss, rebellion, love, family… I love all of O’Farrell’s novels, but I think ‘Land’ might be her finest.” It is “intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.”
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