Maggie O’Farrell has been having quite a moment as a writer in 2026. Earlier this year, she was Oscar-nominated for cowriting the screenplay for Hamnet, based on her own 2020 novel, and now, she had a new bestseller with Land this summer.
O’Farrell has been writing literary fiction for years now, with an increasing focus on historical figures. In her two previous novels, she concentrated on relatively famous figures–William Shakespeare and his wife for Hamnet and Lucrezia de’ Medici for The Marriage Portrait. For her latest, she picks an equally real but more obscure historical person to center the novel on, her own great-great-grandfather.
Like the main character of Land, O’Farrell’s ancestor Tomás was a cartographer who created official maps of Ireland in the wake of the Irish Potato Famine, and maps play a recurring role in the novel.
The Tomás of the book is an eccentric man, immensely talented and intelligent but taciturn and cryptic. After a strange encounter with an ancient spring in 1865 on a mapping job, nothing will ever the same with Tomás or his family, much to their concerned bewilderment. The novel flows centuries earlier to the first inhabitants of the area surrounding the spring and also encompasses decades later, following Tomás’s children.
In the process, this haunting, atmospheric novel meditates on the legacy of colonialism in Ireland and especially the trauma of the horrific Irish Potato Famine, which Tomás and his wife survived as children.
O’Farrell evocatively depicts her settings, whether they’re the poor neighborhood in Dublin where the family lives, the surreal rural spring Tomás is drawn to and its nearby farms, or the far-flung locations his family find themselves in years later.
As fascinating as the themes and settings are, the characters are what really make this book shine. If you expect Tomás to be a majestic hero simply because he is related to the author, think again.
Like all the characters, Tomás is fiercely complex, and though he may not be conventionally likable, there is something endearing about him precisely because he is all too human. And the same is true for the rest of the memorable characters, especially his wife and his children, including the vibrant Edna, the peculiar Eugene, and the conflicted Liam, who accompanies his father on his mapmaking work and is deeply traumatized in his own right by his father’s fixation with the spring. O’Farrell’s warmth and compassion for the characters always shine through and infuses the novel with a gentleness and tenderness amid its generally dark tone.
This novel is a slow burn, with a leisurely pace as it explores the landscapes of its settings and psyches of its characters, before it builds to several shocking but fitting plot twists toward the end. There is a touch of magical realism in the book, but mostly, it is a searing literary historical novel that explores a family and a land disrupted by forces far beyond their control.
I highly recommend this moving, lyrical novel, by turns amusing and heartbreaking.
Recommended for fans of Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín.
PS If you are looking for the Book Buzz shelf in the new library, go to the shelves marked Book Buzz, at the end of adult fiction.
In the old library, we just had one small half shelf for the Book Buzz, but now we have tons of space to highlight picks from the blog!
Are you a Maggie O’Farrell fan? Have you read Land? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on this book or to place it on hold.
Berryville Book Buzz 