“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.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
