I cannot resist a book that starts with a map—especially one depicting a far-off land that may or may not exist. I am also a thorough reader of all things Maggie O’Farrell. So I was doubly thrilled to delve into her latest novel, Land.
O’Farrell is a careful writer who relies on meticulously chosen words to create a rich and enveloping texture for her slightly unreal stories. She has a brilliant ability to lightly layer multiple genres and styles into her storytelling—historical fiction, lyrical prose, Irish folk tales, and symbolic imagery—and she’s never shy about rolling it all up in a nonlinear structure.
Most mainstream readers discovered O’Farrell via Hamnet, published in 2020 and followed by an award-winning film in 2025. Land feels more evocative of her earlier works featuring strong-willed, non-conformist women in a complicated, male-oriented world, like This Must Be the Place (2016), Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), and The Hand that First Held Mine (2010). But it also weaves in the historical aspects of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait (2022).
For Land, O’Farrell apparently drew on her own family history as well as setting the book in her much-loved homeland of Ireland. Her great-great-grandfather worked as a surveyor for the British Ordnance Survey, charged with mapping 19th-century Ireland. And that is how Land begins.
A grumpy and distant father, Tomas, is walking with his young son, Liam, along a post-famine and rain-sodden stretch of Ireland’s west coast in 1865. They both seem miserable in their own isolated ways, and when they stumble upon an eerie stream in an even eerier tree-shrouded copse, they are transformed—still separately. For Liam, it’s terrifying in its powerful magical presence; for Tomas, it’s a euphoric discovery of who and what he is meant to be. This copse, this stream—this is, in part, the land that grounds the story to come.
Here is an Ireland we know from history—malnourished beyond hope, emotionally wounded, visibly collapsed. Tomas has been tasked by the British to map it, and he has the hard skills and education to do so. But the land—like the mysterious copse within it—is rebelling against the lines and structure of his maps. It won’t be reduced to a one-dimensional page. So, like the resistant landforms, a newly inspired Tomas sets out to make a change.
But O’Farrell is no foolish optimist. Whatever stirred Tomas—and terrified Liam—in that stream cannot stand up to British bureaucracy and the deeply embedded Catholic religion encasing the country. And here unfolds the rest of the story.
In her past novels, O’Farrell pays intricate attention to human interactions, and in Land, she offers that same sensitivity to the trees, the stream, the soil, the coastal tides. The land is itself a character, not secondary, but one that drives the story. O’Farrell explores multiple storylines that touch upon the eras and people who traverse this land, but that ultimately return to Tomas and his family.
Tomas goes on to build a home from a dilapidated cottage near the copse for his growing family where they always feel the magical stream. The world around them evolves, the children grow and move away, death interferes with life, but the land remains. As the children age and make choices of their own, the stream seems to know and to prepare them for what’s coming—from giving up a long-buried child and her dog to offering up an ancient ring when most needed, then demanding it all back when the time comes. (I will admit I went down a rabbit hole of old Irish folk tales to learn more about this weird and wonderful talking fish…)
It’s this absolute beauty of interconnectedness and scrupulous storytelling that makes Land not just another notch in the Maggie O’Farrell Irish bedpost, but a truly exemplary novel that reveals the storyteller at her best.