Maggie O’Farrell is most famous for “Hamnet,” the story of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son, which was adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao. It was recognized for its phenomenal performances both by the those who vote for the academy awards and by other much more important tastemakers. Just two months later, “Land” hit American bookstores on June 2, in a great example of good timing.
This portrait of Ireland, however, is also prescient in a different way, focusing on a more recent facet of Irish history.
Sinn Féin, famous Irish nationalist party, won the 2022 elections in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and since 2024, has been the second-largest party in the Republic of Ireland’s Dáil Éireann, its lower legislative body. For the first time ever, every one of the United Kingdom’s decentralized parliaments are controlled by nationalist parties. In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Féin polls measurably higher than its mainstream rivals, who have slumped in support since 2024. The surge in Irish nationalism reflects a lot of things, one of them being the centuries-old debate over what makes Ireland, who is Irish and what is still Irish after colonization. Maggie O’Farrell manages to capture quite a lot of this sweep of history in “Land.”
The novel’s main timeline takes place during the Ordnance Survey of 1865. From here we move forward, into the 1880s, and backward, to the Great Hunger and even into Ireland’s ancient and slightly mystic beginnings. Mysticism is all over “Land,” as present as the redcoats or weather. This aspect is also a magical bailout for extraordinary situations that the characters find themselves in. From the book’s very start, what happens to the characters sometimes feels frustratingly arbitrary. The best explanation we get is that the characters in “Land” seem to be subject to the mystical forces of Ireland, which exist beyond the British, Catholicism, mundane daily life or the struggle to survive in famine. O’Farrell’s interest in these topics is great, but also leaves the reader feeling like the world they’re reading about does not have fixed rules and then, immediately, it’s much harder to care.
That makes it all the more of a relief when O’Farrell draws her story back in and focuses on the family narrative. All of a sudden the stakes become grounded, the characters become three-dimensional and O’Farrell doesn’t have to rely on a clunky plot to drive the story forward. Halfway through my notes, many of which had originally been negative, I wrote that “I can’t help myself but be very charmed by this book.” At some moments I felt like I actively had to fight to keep reading, and if I wasn’t assigned to do so, I probably wouldn’t have. But somewhere in its middle of the novel you hit a tipping point, where you find that O’Farrell’s gift for immersion has left you caring so much for the little band of characters that pace is damned and the story becomes incredibly readable, hard to put away and in the end very moving. You probably can predict “Land”’s biggest twists and sometimes you must slog through O’Farrell’s prose, but on an intimate level, her characters feel like real people, and she convinces you to care quite a bit about their fates.
My experience with “Land” suggests it reads better as a landscape portrait than a novel. As an interesting, caring, deeply researched study of Ireland, coursing through history — with hints of a hidden magic underpinning the island, and an author who almost seems to believe in it — “Land” was quite enjoyable. When O’Farrell is telling that story, I would recommend it to anyone.
Daily Arts Writer Elias Simon can be reached at elmsimon@umich.edu.
