I only came to Maggie O’Farrell’s work recently, having read Hamnet just before the film adaptation was released, and I loved both versions. I also appreciated O’Farrell’s interviews she did on the press junket for the film where she talked about writing and her inspiration. I knew I would want to devour whatever she released next, which brought me directly to Land.

Land digs a deep family story in the soil of the western peninsula of Ireland. The core of the novel depicts two orphaned children of the great famine (Tomas and Phina) who escape a workhouse together and end up settling on the land of the novel’s title where Tomas becomes a mapmaker and they have four children. O’Farrell’s sprawling saga goes back and forth in time, as far back as a chilling medieval episode detailing a horror that happened in the mysterious copse with its haunted stream and pool that seems to bewitch both Tomas and his son, Liam, and into decades beyond where some of the children, as adults, end up in such far-flung places like Quebec and India.

O’Farrell tugs at the heartstrings while keeping the reader in suspense. We’re never sure what kind of stroke of luck or trauma might befall the characters as we bounce from episode to episode. I enjoyed how casually and matter-of-factly she presented the supernatural elements, as if they were, in fact, natural. It made the hardscrabble realism of the rest of the story land that much harder. O’Farrell has crafted a wonderful page-turning piece of historical fiction with Land, which I highly recommend. Grab your reading shovels and dig deep.

Review by D. H. Schleicher