{"id":13310,"date":"2026-06-24T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=13310"},"modified":"2026-07-21T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:22:08","slug":"land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/24\/land\/","title":{"rendered":"Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Roots and Fractures<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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An ambitious narrative follows many characters with ties to a certain plot of land across history, but it fails to achieve coherence or rootedness.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Maura Ronayne<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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With\u00a0the award-winning 2025 film adaptation of her novel, <\/span>Hamnet<\/span><\/i>, millions fell in love with Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s storytelling. Her unique style\u2014focused on familial relationships, hinting at magical realism, and filled with rich sensory details\u2014shines through again in her latest book, <\/span>Land<\/span><\/i>, which brings to life an Irish family reeling in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. With vivid imagery and shifting perspectives and timelines, the story explores themes of grief, family, migration, colonialism, identity, separation, and trauma. <\/span>Land, <\/span><\/i>at four hundred pages of sweeping, beautiful prose,<\/span> is a captivating and ambitious work. But while O\u2019Farrell engages similar authorial tactics as the ones that earned her <\/span>Hamnet <\/span><\/i>fame, <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>splits the narrative in so many directions that it ultimately falls short of being a true historical fiction masterpiece.<\/span><\/p>

Land <\/span><\/i>is a homecoming for O\u2019Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland to Irish parents but raised for the most part in England. One of the novel\u2019s focal characters, Tom\u00e1s, was inspired by her great-great grandfather, who worked for the British as a laborer surveying Ireland in the years following the Famine. <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>opens with Tom\u00e1s and his son Liam at work mapping the countryside, not only marking the geography but also recording a human landscape dramatically altered by mass deaths and widespread emigration. When Tom\u00e1s encounters a mysterious magical pool of water while surveying an unnamed peninsula, his resulting psychological outburst alters the family\u2019s fate forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Liam watches his father unravel, swept up in a mania of mapping unseen worlds until he is saved (or broken) by the attempted exorcism of a local priest. Once they return home, Tom\u00e1s chooses to uproot the family, bringing them back to the site of his mystical experience and insisting that they build and farm there. Tom\u00e1s, his wife Phina, and their children (Liam, Enda, Rose, and Eugene), relocated from their previous urban home, must learn to live like many before them on a land that is haunted by the past. From poverty and oppressive colonial rule to illness, injury, emigration, and death, they suffer every tragedy imaginable, through which they navigate familial relationships, adapt to their circumstances, and form their own understanding of self.<\/span><\/p>

After several chapters told from the perspective of Tom\u00e1s and his family members, the novel abruptly shifts to a new narrative mode, jumping back in time to share a vignette of a girl named Brith in ancient pagan Ireland. Time becomes hazy and unmoored; the narrative condenses and contracts, tracing the land\u2019s history over thousands of years, from Brith\u2019s mysterious ancient tribe to a Celtic couple encountering the first Christian missionaries and fast-forwarding quickly through the ages, focusing on countless generations that are all touched in some way by the peninsula\u2019s timeless supernatural pull. Even after the narrative catches back up to the post-famine era of Tom\u00e1s\u2019 family, O\u2019Farrell narrates with a vast array of third-person perspectives, focusing not just on each of the family\u2019s various members but even dipping into the perspectives of\u2014among others\u2014a priest, a widow, a corpse, and a dog. Characters come and go, woven in and out of the story in a dreamy, disjointed chronology, and only the land remains still, mysterious, unchanging. The dizzying perspective shifts add color to the story and provide interesting and poetic points of reflection, but they also prevent readers from getting to know any one character intimately. At its best, <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>feels like a tapestry weaving together disparate human beings across time and space. At its worst, it feels disjointed, detached, and affected.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Time, place, and narrative voice are muddled and dreamily hazy, and nothing feels rooted or real in a way that makes the historical setting come alive for its readers.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Beyond\u00a0its jumbled chronology and irregular narrative voice, the novel\u2019s rendering of place is lacking. Given that the book is titled <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>and framed by the life of a land surveyor, a reader might be forgiven for expecting the characters to experience a deeper attachment to the earth on which they live. But in O\u2019Farrell\u2019s imagined Ireland (which is referred to not by name but as the \u201cdog-shaped island\u201d), land is something neutral, imbued with a kind of strange magic but largely indifferent to the human beings that make their lives upon it. Tom\u00e1s and his family are not natives but settlers on the peninsula, and their story is just one of many families and individuals before them. They may make a living off the land, but there is no continuity between them and those that came before them, no shared culture or religion or human history passed down through the ages. They are superficially connected to each other by the land and by the supernatural pull of its \u201choly well,\u201d but they don\u2019t develop a relationship with the land itself\u2014no land ever really becomes <\/span>home<\/span><\/i>. Then, as the novel progresses, readers even lose sight of both Ireland and the family\u2019s little peninsula as several characters emigrate to different continents.<\/span><\/p>

This disconnection from the land feels in part intentional. Through oppression and tragedy, characters are repeatedly displaced both physically and emotionally. Tom\u00e1s and Phina were violently uprooted from their homes during the Famine. They can never truly go back, so they are psychologically homeless. They are also tenant farmers, not owners of their own land, and their existence hinges on the external forces of colonialism and the whims of the British aristocrats who extract labor from them. The stories of those who lived before them are similarly fraught with destabilising violence and death: human sacrifice, Viking raids, a Catholic monk killing a druid, warfare, English invasion and cruelty, and slow starvation. Tragedies continue and compound with each successive generation. The metaphysical landscape is one of overlapping traumas warped and bound together across time, complicated further by an undefined encroachment of the supernatural world. The narrative pace of such trials and tribulations is relentless. Healing never comes; the characters suffer without respite or space for growth. The reader is left reeling beneath successive waves of catastrophe, with no truly rooted sense of time, place, or narrative voice from which to anchor the story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Beyond their relationships with the land, the characters\u2019 relationships with each other also feel shallow. Almost every protagonist is an outsider, disconnected geographically and socially from any real community, and they make decisions based on their own whims and feelings rather than any loyalty or thought for the family unit. Whenever the narrative of <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>is not driven by sweeping external forces of trauma and oppression, it is propelled by characters\u2019 independent desires for self-actualization\u2014whether it\u2019s Tom\u00e1s and his subsistence farming, Liam and his vocation, or Enda and her pseudo-feminist impulses. While self-knowledge and self-expression are not poor character drivers in themselves, these tropes dominate the narrative so strongly that there is little room for meaningful, believable relationships between the characters; in <\/span>Land<\/span><\/i>, love is secondary to identity, and that identity itself is untethered to family, people, or tradition. O\u2019Farrell provides the basic scaffolding for strong interpersonal bonds, but in their actions, thoughts, and dialogues, the characters’ desires for self-discovery supersede their relationships with each other. Instead of clan, home, and country, characters act with an individualistic moral framework that feels superimposed by a modern writer.<\/span><\/p>

The best historical fiction can immerse the reader fully in a particular time and place, providing access to the unique lived experiences of its subjects while still revealing to its readers a thread of humanity that persists through every age. O\u2019Farrell is a good writer, and <\/span>Land <\/span><\/i>is filled with beautiful language and interesting storytelling techniques. Yet ultimately, the novel does not deliver on either the particularities of its time or the universalities of the human condition. Time, place, and narrative voice are muddled and dreamily hazy, and nothing feels rooted or real in a way that makes the historical setting come alive for its readers. At the same time, its characters often seem driven less by timeless values of love and loyalty and more by a contemporary understanding of individual identity and self-actualization. For all its lyrical language and ambitious themes, it never achieves the rootedness\u2014in place, in history, or in human experience\u2014that distinguishes truly great historical fiction.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Maura Ronayne<\/strong>\u00a0is\u00a0the Director of Marketing & Communications at the\u00a0Abigail Adams Institute, an organization dedicated to revitalizing humanities education at Harvard. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2020 and now lives with her husband Mathieu in Arlington, MA.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Land<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>by Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u00a0<\/strong>was published by Penguin Random House on May 27, 2026.\u00a0Fare Forward<\/span><\/em>\u00a0appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An ambitious narrative follows many characters with ties to a certain plot of land across history, but it fails to achieve coherence or rootedness. Review by Maura 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