{"id":6485,"date":"2026-06-02T04:27:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T04:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6485"},"modified":"2026-06-02T04:27:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T04:27:31","slug":"land-by-maggie-ofarrell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6485","title":{"rendered":"Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell"},"content":{"rendered":"

The opening pages of Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/em> drop the reader onto a windswept Atlantic peninsula. The year is 1865, the wind is salted and ceaseless, and a ten-year-old boy named Liam stands holding the end of a surveying chain while his father, Tom\u00e1s, measures the distance between two drumlins. Twenty years after the Great Hunger emptied this parish of forty cabins down to four, the British have decided the maps of Ireland need revising. Tom\u00e1s, a workhouse boy turned cartographer who once chalked a map of his own workhouse onto its yard wall to win the job, has been sent to redraw a place that no longer entirely exists.<\/p>\n

What happens next, in a copse on the southern slope of a hillock, is the secret engine of the novel. Tom\u00e1s disappears into the trees and returns several days later in a crown of leaves, raving, anointed, transformed. From that moment, Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/em> unfolds not as a single story but as a long, patient inquiry into what survives.<\/p>\n

The Story, Without Spoiling Any of It<\/h3>\n

Liam\u2019s chapters are threaded from the start with a thin, ominous line set decades later in Calcutta, where a man in his thirty-first year sits before a panel of robed interrogators. The reader knows, without yet knowing why, that the boy on the hill will travel a very long way from the peninsula. His sisters, Enda the fierce fiddler and Rose the small softness between her older siblings, will travel further still. Their mother Phina, a seamstress with a needle as steady as her marriage isn\u2019t, holds the household together by sheer force of practical kindness. Later, in the family\u2019s reshaping, a baby called Eugene arrives, who turns out to be the strangest of them all.<\/p>\n

If you have read Hamnet<\/em> or The Marriage Portrait<\/em>, you will recognise the way O\u2019Farrell moves the lens, sitting inside one consciousness for a paragraph, then sliding gently across the room to another. Here she expands the technique across decades and continents. The reader sits inside Tom\u00e1s as he sketches a workhouse from memory, then inside the widow who took dried sea-kelp out of her clothes-chest to dress a stranger\u2019s frozen son, then inside Liam much later, looking at a parakeet feather caught in a banyan tree. Each interior is rendered with such tactile clarity that the shifts feel less like cuts than like the tide pulling out and revealing more of the same shore.<\/p>\n

What O\u2019Farrell Does Beautifully Here<\/h3>\n

There is no other living writer working in English who can render a small physical sensation, the prickle of a darned patch under a thumb, the cool divot in a pebble that fits a fingertip, with O\u2019Farrell\u2019s degree of attention. The book is built almost entirely from such moments. It has very little plot in the conventional sense, and a great deal of texture.<\/p>\n

Some of its quieter pleasures:<\/p>\n

The Gaeilge sits in the text without apology. A tobar<\/em> is a well, a boreen<\/em> is a small lane, a gruagach<\/em> is a wild man of the hills. O\u2019Farrell trusts the reader to absorb the language as the children do, by ear.
\nThe cartography is a real argument. Tom\u00e1s\u2019s insistence that maps can be acts of resistance rather than instruments of empire becomes the spine of the novel. The British survey of Ireland<\/a> was, in fact, a project that anglicised place-names and codified ownership, and the book takes that politics seriously without ever lecturing.
\nA particularly loyal dog. Bran earns every line he is given, and the way the household arranges itself around him says something honest about Irish rural domesticity.
\nThe widow. A minor character who steps into the story for one evening and ends up holding much of its moral weight. Her chest of unworn clothes, sewn long ago for sons who never grew into them, is one of the most quietly devastating images in recent Irish fiction.<\/p>\n

The prose, throughout, is alert in the way only a writer with a long apprenticeship to her own sentences can manage. O\u2019Farrell adapts her register to the perspective. Phina\u2019s chapters are stitched as tight as her sewing. Eugene\u2019s are looser, weather-led, almost wordless. The peninsula itself, with its hillocks and tulachs and inky cross-currents, becomes its own slow-breathing character.<\/p>\n

Where the Book Asks for Patience<\/h3>\n

A four-star reception is, I think, the right one. The book is remarkable, but it is not without strain.<\/p>\n

A few things readers may push back on, fairly:<\/p>\n

The dual timeline anchored in Calcutta promises a confrontation that takes the better part of four hundred pages to arrive, and the middle stretch repeats certain notes more often than is strictly necessary.
\nThe folkloric element, the strange sightings around the well, sits oddly against the otherwise scrupulous realism. It either lands for you or it doesn\u2019t, and there isn\u2019t a comfortable middle ground.
\nThe Calcutta sections, though beautifully written, feel slightly under-furnished beside the saturated detail of the Irish chapters. The colonial setting is sketched rather than fully inhabited.
\nSeveral secondary figures, in particular the British surveyors and the priest who tries to coax Tom\u00e1s back to himself, are drawn in fewer strokes than they probably deserve.<\/p>\n

None of this is fatal, and almost all of it is the kind of compromise a long, ambitious book of this shape tends to make. But the novel does ask its reader to surrender to its own slow internal weather, and impatient readers may resist. Compared to the focused, chamber-piece intensity of Hamnet<\/em>, Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/em> is sprawling and tidal.<\/p>\n

Where It Sits in Her Body of Work<\/h3>\n

O\u2019Farrell\u2019s bibliography by now describes a clear arc. From the early contemporary novels (After You\u2019d Gone<\/em>, My Lover\u2019s Lover<\/em>, The Hand That First Held Mine<\/em>) through the more historically textured Instructions for a Heatwave<\/em> and This Must Be the Place<\/em>, she has moved steadily toward fiction of deeper time. Hamnet<\/em> announced that turn fully, The Marriage Portrait<\/em> refined it, and Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/em> extends it across a wider canvas. Readers who came to her through her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am<\/em> will recognise the same preoccupation with the threshold between living and not living, with what the body and the land both keep.<\/p>\n

If You Loved This, Try<\/h3>\n

Books that share the soil, the period, or the sensibility:<\/p>\n

Translations<\/em> by Brian Friel, the 1980 play about the same Ordnance Survey project, with which Land<\/em> is in deep and obvious conversation.
\nA Ghost in the Throat<\/em> by Doireann N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa, for its bone-deep attention to Irish women, language, and inherited history.
\nSmall Things Like These<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan, for compressed Irish historical fiction of similar moral weight.
\nDays Without End<\/em> by Sebastian Barry, for an Irish emigrant\u2019s voice carried across decades and continents.
\nStar of the Sea<\/em> by Joseph O\u2019Connor, for the Famine, the coffin ships, and the diaspora.
\nThe Whalebone Theatre<\/em> by Joanna Quinn, for the family-saga shape and tactile period prose.<\/p>\n

Closing the Book<\/h3>\n

What stays, after the last page, is not exactly the story. It is the peninsula, and the copse, and the sense that some places are older than the people walking on them and will outlast the maps drawn of them. Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell<\/em> is a novel of accumulated small acts of looking, and like the best of her work, it leaves the reader\u2019s own world looking a little more closely seen.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The opening pages of Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell drop the reader onto a windswept Atlantic peninsula. The year is 1865, the wind is salted and ceaseless, and a ten-year-old boy named Liam stands holding the end of a surveying chain while his father, Tom\u00e1s, measures the distance between two drumlins. Twenty years after the Great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}