Reviewed by Seán Maigh
“The luck of the Irish” is a phrase that could only have been minted by somebody who never actually had to live there. Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel understands this down to the subsoil. There is precious little luck in Land — and that, both gloriously and maddeningly, appears to be the design.
The furniture first. Land is a 2026 historical novel, published in June by Alfred A. Knopf, and O’Farrell’s tenth. It opens in 1865, in the stunned aftermath of the Great Hunger, on the famine-scarred west coast of Ireland, where the mapmaker Tomás and his son Liam are painstakingly charting a devastated country for the Ordnance Survey. An unsettling encounter in a copse sends Tomás abruptly off course, and the lives of his family will never be the same: he jacks in the surveying to make, in his own words, “a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been”, spending the family’s savings to lease land by the copse and moving his wife and children into a cottage abandoned during the Hunger. From there the book broadens into a multi-generational family saga. O’Farrell — Women’s Prize winner for Hamnet, Costa Novel Award winner for The Hand That First Held Mine — reveals in an introductory note that her great-great-grandfather worked on the early maps of Ireland not long after the Great Hunger, and that researching his life was the impetus for the book.
This is only the second O’Farrell I have read, after Hamnet, which I also enjoyed, and both books confirm the same verdict: she is an amazing writer, and a transporting one. She writes so that you know you are there, in the fields and the lanes of history. You can feel the wind, the people, the atmosphere. Crucially for a novel this steeped in place, she leans into the Irish brogue without it ever sounding faux — no stage-Irish, no cod-Celtic twinkle, just speech that lets you feel the authenticity of her world.
Her cleverest trick is one of balance. Land teeters on the edge of the mystical and the fantastical without ever going away with the faeries — just enough to make you feel that Ireland was, is and always will be on the periphery of magic. And yet dig into what her characters actually experience and nothing magical happens to them at all. It is miserable. It is tough, it is hard, and hope never comes in. When it does arrive, it is readily snatched away.
Much of the critical weather has taken this darkness as strength. Kirkus, in a starred review, found it “steeped in Irish history and folklore, alive with a sense of wonder”, though even Kirkus conceded that the disasters befalling the family pile so high that only O’Farrell’s reminders of Ireland’s long, tragic history keep them from seeming excessive. Vogue read a book that ultimately “pulses with a luminous sense of hope”, and Patricia Nicol in The Times judged it her most far-reaching, ambitious novel to date, one that might finally snag the Booker nomination that has so far eluded her.
Where Vogue saw pulses, I saw dousings. I don’t mind a bleak story — I have read plenty. But in Land, whenever the cracks open and the light starts to come in, it is very quickly put out. And maybe that’s the point. Living there, then, was not a bowl of happiness; I get that entirely. But why make it worse? Happiness comes to everyone, eventually, and resilience is what makes the difference — and it is resilience, not misery, that this book’s most lovable characters actually run on. A little more trust in that would have carried the novel from very good to unforgettable.
Still: Land was an enjoyable read, peopled with characters you genuinely love, and it makes a great many sharp points about the things we tie ourselves to — and, more importantly, the things that matter. O’Farrell has surveyed misery with a master’s eye and mapped it in prose that puts you in the wind and the wet. Follow her map anyway. Just don’t expect it to be marked with sunshine.