Land, by the peerless Maggie O’Farrell, is a book of strange, uncommon tenderness. The setting is 19th-century Ireland, the protagonists’ four siblings and their parents, survivors (just) of the Great Famine, each with wildly different personalities and destinies. Land is psychogeography taken to its temporal extreme – characters’ lives interweave across time and across geography, a warp and woof rendered sharply poignant in the way the main characters manage to miss (and misunderstand) each other emotionally, despite living so closely for so long. We follow the six emanating out (to varying degrees and distances) from hearth and home (with varying degrees of success and disaster). The final word (ironically…) is given to the son who stays home, who discovers that “…he possesses knowledge both great and useful, that he contains everything he needs, has all he requires and no more.” With echoes of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and Paul Kingsnorth’s debut novel The Wake,’ O’Farrell transports us expertly to the steely reality of 19th century Ireland and America, with all the hardships, oppression and possibility of the times, infused with a hint of magic when the tale occasionally slips into the distant past. A masterpiece.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell, (List Price: $32, Knopf, 9780593320648, June 2026)
Reviewed by Doron, Octavia Books in New Orleans, LA