Land by Maggie O'Farrell

First Impressions

“Land” is Maggie O'Farrell's tenth novel, and this is clearly a skilled writer at the height of her powers. She's already a beloved, award-winning author, but she's having quite the year: alongside this major new book, she received an Oscar nomination for co-writing the adapted screenplay for the “Hamnet” film with Chloé Zhao.

I read “Land” with my online book club, and we've had some really great discussions about it. It was such an immersive, atmospheric experience — first off, this is a family saga, and I have a passion for good family sagas. I wouldn't say I unreservedly loved this novel; I did have some issues with it, which I'll get to. But it's genuinely impressive how O'Farrell balances so many things in this story and packs so much into it, and the quality of the writing at a sentence level is such a pleasure to read.

Premise

The novel opens in 1865 on the west coast of Ireland, a decade after the Great Famine. We follow Tomás, an Irish mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey, and his reluctant ten-year-old son Liam, as Tomás sets out to map a certain section of the country. Their dynamic felt especially moving to me: quite quickly, Tomás undergoes a transformation that destabilizes their relationship, and Liam — who'd previously hated the work and didn't even want to be on this trip — suddenly just wants things to go back to normal, because he realizes he can no longer rely on the parent he'd always depended on. There's something so heartbreaking about a child recognizing that.

That split motivates the very different directions Tomás and Liam's lives take afterward, and it casts a shadow over the whole story. At first, Tomás's sudden change of course felt like it came a little too easily, but as the novel digs into his backstory, it becomes clear his turn is rooted in trauma from his own difficult past rather than being arbitrary.

It's a dramatic, surprising opening, and there's real suspense throughout — surprises I didn't see coming, both narratively and in terms of plot. O'Farrell sustains real tension across a relatively long book, though I think it could have been even longer, honestly, since there were other elements I'd have gladly read more of.

This novel is about so many things at once: a family story, emigration from Ireland, the relationships between family members and how they transform over time, connections and breaks within families, the history of Ireland and British colonialism, mythology, and the psychology of its characters. It intertwines all of these elements into a genuinely riveting tale.

Details in the Cover

One of the joys of this book — at least the UK edition — is that there are design elements embedded in the cover that click into place once you've read it. I have to credit members of my book club for pointing some of these out. Renee spotted a small embossed gold fish on the back cover, which turns out to carry real weight once you know the mythology underneath this novel (more on that below). Nancy noticed that if you turn the cover on its side, the black shape in the middle looks like a dog sitting at rest — and there is indeed a dog in this novel, part of a lineage of dogs that matters a great deal to the story. I love how O'Farrell included a non-human animal this way; the land in this novel doesn't just belong to the humans, but to other inhabitants too, living, dead, and mythological.

The Weight of History

It's impressive how O'Farrell balances the real history of people who suffered through the Great Famine with the rest of the story. We see a village that's been decimated, and there's a very moving early scene where Tomás meets a local widow while trying to remap the area — she recounts, house by house, which homes are empty and which have only one or a few survivors left. There's a heartbreaking moment where she sorts through clothes she made for her now-deceased family, conveying the scale of the collective grief in that community.

The occasional references to the Viscount are genuinely chilling — a figure of imperial greed who holds sway over the locals' lives while living in his own separate, privileged reality, physically close to Tomás and the villagers but worlds apart socially and financially. It's a legal requirement of tenancy, we're told, for locals to salute the Viscount whenever they encounter him — which is absolutely outrageous, and it made me think about how the demarcation of borders on a map isn't just an abstract exercise in geography. It has legal ramifications that shape the tangible, daily reality of whoever lives on that land.

Early on, the book also carries real Dickensian notes, especially in the sections touching on Tomás and his wife Phina's early life together and the hardships they endured.

Part of the emotional anchor of this book, as O'Farrell has discussed in interviews, is her own strong connection to it. She was born in Ireland (though raised mostly in Scotland and Wales), and her great-great-grandfather — also named Tomás — was commissioned by the British Ordnance Survey to map the land, just like the character. He also had a son who became a Jesuit, which is the basis for Liam's storyline.

She's exploring her own family history and imagining what life must have been like for these ancestors — something I think most of us wonder about, usually with only scattered fragments of information to go on. That's really at the heart of this book: wondering about people from the past, the struggles they faced, and putting ourselves in their shoes. It ties into Ireland's long history of diaspora, where economic and political hardship forced people to leave and try to build better lives elsewhere, fragmenting families across the world.

A major theme of the book is disconnection, and O'Farrell renders it in some genuinely moving ways — there are several instances throughout the novel of family members who lose touch, or who come close to each other without ever realizing it, because of everything that's been severed by displacement and time. It's a far-fetched kind of coincidence in places, but this sort of thing has probably happened many times throughout history — so much gets lost between generations as people move and family connections are severed. O'Farrell uses this to show how large historical forces and institutions can transform a family from a single unit into disconnected individuals struggling to survive on their own. There are also moments where connections are painfully, movingly reformed, and even with the coincidences involved, it felt believable to me given how common this kind of dispersal actually was.

A Note on Tone

Some people in my book club found this book, while an excellent reading experience, quite depressing overall, and I'd agree that a few specific moments feel almost overwhelmingly sad, on top of the reverberating effects of the Famine that shadow the entire story. I think it's partly a somber book because it's representing the lives of people caught up in real historical tragedy, both on a large scale and an individual one.

But O'Farrell tempers this with instances where hope is possible. There are several moments where things could easily have gone much worse for these characters than they actually do, and O'Farrell includes a real amount of hope alongside the awfulness. It builds genuine dramatic tension — I couldn't predict how things would turn out for these family members, and I mean that as a compliment.

Structure

Technically, this novel is quite unusual — O'Farrell puts it together in a structurally ambitious way, but it never left me confused, even when I was surprised by where it went. It's broken into parts rather than chapters. The first part switches between three timelines: Tomás and Liam in 1865, Tomás's own childhood, and a future point involving Liam. It keeps moving between these until you really understand these characters, and it builds a larger, more complex picture of Tomás.

At another point, the narrative plunges into the deep history of the land itself, centered on a sacred spring in a copse that Tomás and Liam stumble across — I found this section genuinely inventive and fun, and it clearly shows the influence of “North Woods” by Daniel Mason, which O'Farrell has cited in interviews: if you've read it, you'll know it centers a single house as its own protagonist across centuries of inhabitants. O'Farrell has taken this kind of experimental approach to narrative and time before, too — most notably in “Hamnet”, which tracks the bubonic plague's journey as it reaches England.

Later, O'Farrell springs a genuinely clever structural surprise involving the siblings that I didn't see coming and won't spoil here. Techniques like this add a great deal of suspense to the reading experience, and it's part of why I think this book works so well specifically as a novel, and not just as a cast of characters waiting to be brought to life on screen, which was a criticism Melissa Harrison raised in her Guardian review of the book.

Irish Mythology Woven Through

O'Farrell folds a handful of Irish myths into this family saga so that the prehistoric past and 1865 feel like the same ground remembering itself. It's a poignant detail that the author's father used to read her these myths when she was a child — something she resented at the time but is grateful for now. I've been enjoying reading more about these and how they might have inspired O'Farrell in writing this novel.

The spring that Tomás and Liam discover draws on the legend of the Salmon of Knowledge: a salmon that eats the hazelnuts of wisdom that fall into a sacred well, so that whoever eats the salmon in turn gains all the world's knowledge — this is how the boy Deimne becomes the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill. It's a lovely detail that the golden fish embossed on the back cover turns out to be a quiet key to the whole novel once you know this myth. The spring the family finds isn't just a pretty piece of landscape — it's the well of wisdom from the oldest layer of Irish myth, and the cover is quietly signalling that from the start.

Sacred wells with healing powers are an important strand of real Irish folk practice, and this was clearly a major influence on O'Farrell, who has described visiting a number of these wells scattered around Ireland. There's also the legend of Oisín, a man who leaves for the Otherworld and returns to find centuries have passed, aging instantly the moment he touches Irish soil again — I think this legend was on O'Farrell's mind while writing the novel's emigration strands, even if (as I get into below) those sections abroad aren't quite as engaging as the ones set in Ireland.

The family dog is named Bran, after Fionn mac Cumhaill's own legendary hound — and in the myth, Bran isn't an ordinary dog at all, but a transformed human, born to a woman who was turned into a hound while pregnant. O'Farrell draws on that myth in a way that blurs the line between human and animal, in exactly the way the cover's hidden dog silhouette hints at.

Irish folklore is also full of people turning into animals, and of changelings — uncanny children who carry a wisdom beyond their years. That idea is embodied in Eugene, the novel's nonverbal son, who can be read simultaneously as a child with a real, grounded condition and as something more mythic. There's a genuinely satisfying payoff to this thread by the novel's end, which I'll leave for you to discover.

Where It Loses Some Steam

O'Farrell has said she deliberately set out to write a different kind of Irish emigration story, since there are already so many excellent ones. The novel follows Liam and Enda as they move abroad, and how their individual stories unfold is genuinely surprising. Enda, who has natural musical talents, has a story I found fascinating, if harrowing. Liam's strand — training with the Jesuits — I found less engaging; it felt more plodding, and I kept wanting the book to return to the main family story back in Ireland. I suspect O'Farrell became especially invested in Liam's section because of how directly it mirrors her own family history: her great-grandfather joining the Jesuits (a significant thing for a rural boy at the time) and later leaving the order (also significant). It's understandable she wanted to imaginatively fill in so many details about this occurrence, but I felt it did pull focus from the stronger core of the book.

Characters and Where It All Lands

I was deeply engaged by Tomás and Phina's relationship, which changes over time as circumstances pull the two of them in different directions. The split between Tomás and Liam is painful, but it's moving to watch how their relationship evolves over the rest of the book. I also appreciated the tense, prickly relationship between Tomás and Enda, which shifts in some rewarding ways as the story goes on. Rose, understandably, has real friction with Enda over the course of the novel, and following where that relationship goes was one of the more affecting threads for me.

There's also a lovely recurring object: a shawl connected to Phina's side of the family, which survives only as a single tassel by the story's end — the kind of small, seemingly inconsequential object so many families keep passing down long after its original meaning has been lost.

Where the novel ultimately lands is dramatic and genuinely hopeful — O'Farrell gives the story real emotional light amid the tragedy and puts a clever new spin on the mythology she's built up throughout its final pages. Even with some reservations, and a few coincidences that stretch credulity, I was completely swept into this novel and really enjoyed the experience. What Maggie O'Farrell has done here is genuinely impressive.

If you've read this book, I'd love to know what you thought: what were your favourite elements, what did you make of the structure, did the mythology woven through it work for you? And if you're thinking about reading it, or have another favourite Maggie O'Farrell novel, I'd love to hear about that too. Of her other books, a couple I've found completely immersive are “The Marriage Portrait” and “This Must Be the Place” — though “Land” might now be my favourite of hers. It's a great achievement, and I had such a wonderful time reading it.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

With her latest novel “The Marriage Portrait” Maggie O'Farrell proves that she's one of the finest historical novelists working today. The basis of her inspiration comes from using that classic trick of plucking a semi-obscure figure from the distant past along with a bit of gossip to conjure a tale from between the pages of history. The subject is Lucrezia de' Medici, a noble daughter from Florence who was married to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara in 1558 when she was only thirteen. A year later she died from what was labelled as “putrid fever” but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by Alfonso. Although this new novel is set in the mid-1500s (only a few decades prior to her previous novel “Hamnet”) the stories are worlds apart. We follow Lucrezia's life as she is born into a busy privileged Italian household and ostracised for being the strange daughter of the family. O'Farrell imaginatively transports readers to this era with sumptuous, lavish, gorgeously-rendered detail of palace life with its many ornate rooms and hidden corridors, trysts and shady dealings and a menagerie of exotic animals kept for Cosimo, the Duke of Tuscany's amusement. When Lucrezia ventures into the depths of the palace to spy upon her father's new acquisition of a tigress she feels a momentary connection with this wild beautiful animal that stirs her spirit.

The narrative alternates between the story of her upbringing and her time at the remote “hunting lodge” of her husband Alfonso when Lucrezia is suddenly convinced “that he intends to kill her.” Is this true? Is she delirious from illness? Is she paranoid? Is there any way she can survive? These questions remain tantalizingly suspended throughout the story until the exhilarating and clever climax. There are so many compelling characters: vain sisters, bratty brothers, a wise nursemaid, seductive suitors, mysterious artists and scheming friends. As heads of the family, Eleanora and her husband Cosimo provide a model example of rulers of the region in their productivity and determination to educate all their children – both the boys and girls. However, their great flaw is underestimating their daughter Lucrezia. Here she is placed at the centre of the novel as the consummate outsider and forgotten child whose artistic talent leaves her teachers in awe. Though this position naturally makes her somewhat lonely, it's also advantageous as she can see the workings of things more clearly from a distance. Lucrezia's keen skills of observation and ability to discern power dynamics serves her well. She probably would have remained sidelined by her siblings if her elder sister Maria hadn't died from illness which means Lucrezia is ushered to take her place in marrying Alfonso.

I felt so drawn into the dynamics of palace life. O'Farrell is very skilful at evoking this period as well as creating a mystery around Alfonso who comes across as so charming but secretive. It's a tribute to the author's ability that she can build such a strong sense of hope while also making readers dread an impending doom. I was kept in suspense throughout while being spellbound by the heady experience of Lucrezia's wealthy but cloistered life. What's especially intriguing about this historical novel is the way the author allows you to see how things could have played out so differently if fate had blown in a different direction. If Maria hadn't died from disease and married Alfonso her outcome would have been very different from Lucrezia's. If Alfonso hadn't been so ruthless in his desire to produce an heir and allowed Lucrezia to become his equal partner, they could have ruled in as harmonious a way as Lucrezia's parents. O'Farrell shows how certain events dictate history, but they don't determine the future. And through the inspiring conclusion she establishes an ingenious way for us to re-view the past.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Why Shakespeare? In Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” the author uses her considerable talent for mapping the emotional terrain and intimate relationships of her contemporary characters over a long period of time to write a historical novel about the plague-ridden reality of late 16th century England and the death of Shakespeare’s adolescent son Hamnet. Four years after the boy’s death the Bard wrote ‘Hamlet’, a name that was used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time. Given we know only a slender amount about Shakespeare’s life and he wrote nothing of his personal grief, it’s irresistible to speculate on what motivated him to immortalize his son’s name in a play which went on to be one of the most quoted literary works in the English language. However, rather than portray Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings, O’Farrell instead focuses on the lives of his family: Shakespeare and Agnes’ hastily arranged marriage, the illness of Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, Hamnet’s sudden death and the devastating grief which followed. This is powerfully rendered, beautifully written with evocative historical details and I enjoyed it immensely but…

I felt like something was lacking. A problem might be in my expectations for this novel which has been much-hyped and lauded. It’s been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, tipped for the Booker and a prominent review ended by simply stating “this is a work that ought to win prizes.” Publicity for the book describes it as “the heart-stopping story behind Shakespeare’s most famous play.” But the novel tells us very little about Shakespeare’s motivation or influence for writing the play beyond what I’ve already described. So I feel that if O’Farrell uses this as a premise her fiction needs to converse with and expand our understanding of Shakespeare’s writing and his literary stature by imaginatively inhabiting his reality. However, Shakespeare is very much a periphery character who is emotionally and physically absent from his family in Stratford while he pursues his dramatic work in London. Of course, this was no doubt the reality. But if we’re not going to get Shakespeare’s perspective or a feeling for the man himself why include him as a character or focus on this central storyline?

Instead, O’Farrell inventively and movingly imagines the life of Agnes as someone with healing powers and quasi-psychic abilities who frequently gathers flowers and herbs to concoct healing mixtures for many of the locals. It’s remarked that “Agnes is of another world. She does not quite belong here.” She’s an entirely-convincing, fully rounded character who is strong and full of heart. I found it very touching how she’s hampered with feelings of guilt about her son’s fate even though she couldn’t have predicted the outcome of his illness or prevented his death. Also, her ambivalent feelings about her husband are a poignant and realistic depiction of a relationship. She’ll never want to see him again one moment and then another moment will feel achingly close to him. She also recognizes that his family and life in Stratford could never be enough for him: “She can tell, even through her dazed exhaustion, even before she can take his hand, that he has found it, he is fitting it, he is inhabiting it - that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do.” All of this detail and characterization is excellent but it could be about any family with an absent husband/father.

Shakespeare looms large in our esteem as probably the greatest writer in Western literature and there’s a prolific amount of biographical literature based on relatively few facts making the Bard seem more mythical than historical. Therefore, O’Farrell’s novel feels somewhat like fanfiction that imaginatively and powerfully builds a domestic universe out of the slenderly-known central players in his life. It makes an important statement by naming these figures and conspicuously not naming Shakespeare at all in the novel – he’s only ever referred to by his status as either “the husband”, “the tutor” or “the father”. Perhaps it is partly O’Farrell’s purpose in writing this book to state that the man was merely mortal and his reality was probably as ordinary as his stark and plain writing room that we get a glimpse of late in the novel. That’s perfectly fine. But…

While reading this novel I kept thinking of “Lincoln in the Bardo” and how much Saunders dynamically builds on both our historical and imagined understanding of Abraham Lincoln as a legendary political figure from American history. As with any prominent figure, it shows how he had to balance his personal reality with his public reputation. But “Hamnet” shows us almost nothing about Shakespeare’s conflict except why he’s almost entirely absented himself from family life: “He sees how he may become mired in Stratford forever, a creature with its leg in the jaws of an iron trap, with his father next door, and his son, cold and decaying, beneath the churchyard sod.” But even before Hamnet’s death he rarely visited his family. A writer who feels like they can’t simultaneously maintain a family and professional life is an interesting subject, but his feelings on this aren’t explored either. The most moving portrait of Shakespeare in this novel comes when he tries to engage Agnes in talking about the flora she gathers rather than discussing their son’s death and Agnes resolutely ignores him. Otherwise, I was left as surprised and confused as Agnes about why Shakespeare named his play after his son – other than a fairly obvious psychological interpretation for his motivations. This left me feeling somewhat deflated at the end of the novel.

Given our current circumstances, I also have to note the bizarre coincidence that this novel focuses so much on the effects of a pandemic. It describes in detail the symptoms the plague has on the body and the way measures were taken to try to contain the illness. There are references to theatres needing to periodically close because of it. There’s also an imaginative and impressive section which describes the journey of the illness and how is spreads through fleas from a young sailor to a glass craftsman and how it finally comes to infect a member of Shakespeare’s family. It’s a strange experience reading a novel whose central subject matter becomes surprisingly topical. I also want to stress how much I enjoyed this excellent novel and I’m not surprised it has many enthusiastic fans, but I just wasn’t as impressed as some other readers have been.

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

A novel about a reclusive ex-film star may sound like it will focus on sensational glamour rather than an emotionally-effective story, but “This Must Be the Place” is engrossing and extremely moving. Maggie O'Farrell creates a woman named Claudette who walks away from her famous director husband and a successful acting career to live in the remotest possible Ireland retreat and weaves her tale into the stories of many other fascinating characters. Most notably it charts her relationship with Daniel who deals with the complicated family he had with his first wife, an unresolved secret from his past and a growing substance abuse problem. Each chapter focuses on a specific character related to this couple. It leapfrogs back and forth through time to form impressions of their dramatic and tumultuous lives. The cumulative effect of this very readable novel is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the way chance and coincidence influence the most important decisions of our lives.

In one section, Daniel and his son Niall travel to the eerie and unusual salt flats of South America.

O'Farrell has a fascinating way of mapping out the lives of her characters in this novel. Each chapter is sub-headed by a name, year and location so you know with certainty where you are, but only through the course of the narrative do you understand why this point matters so much. The focus varies from stories about Daniel’s son Niall’s painful struggles with a severe eczema condition at a special dermatological clinic to Claudette’s sister-in-law Maeve’s journey to China to adopt a daughter. Through these fascinating individual stories we gain impressions of what’s happening in Daniel and Claudette’s lives as well. My only quibble is I wish the author had included a section on Daniel’s first wife rather than so many peripheral characters towards the end. It felt like she was the only major character that remained sketchily drawn where the others were fully rounded. Multiple sections are told from Daniel’s point of view as he seems to have the most trouble finding where he really belongs. However, the only section which focuses on Claudette’s perspective is narrated in the second person so, although we’re entirely with her, we remain outside her consciousness. This distancing effect from her character is mirrored in another section where we’re given photographs of vital objects from her film career that are being auctioned, but which cleverly tell the story of her relationship with the cerebral Scandinavian film director Timou.

I think people who enjoy Anne Tyler’s books would also really appreciate this novel. O'Farrell has a similar way of realistically portraying the quirks, humour and heartache of family life. She also touches upon the complex way we come to define ourselves through the perspectives of others. In particular, she beautifully describes the way those who love us see us in an idealistic light which in turn reinforces our own self confidence: “What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another.” The story meaningfully shows how complex relationships can be and that we’ll inevitably follow lots of indirect paths in life, but how powerfully changed we are when honest connections are made. “This Must Be the Place” is a skilfully written novel with a lot of heart.