A powerful epic about a place and its long-suffering peoples, told through hardships and moments of grace. It packs a wallop ... Like much of O’Farrell’s work, Land is lushly written, atmospheric, and heartbreaking – yet it is also a moving paean to perseverance, survival, and forgiveness ... A magnificent achievement.
A soaring, visionary narrative that connects the known world to the misty realms of Celtic legend ... As the struggling men and women in Land endure defeat and distrust victory, it is their frailty as much as their strength that wins our sympathy and holds our attention ... Her lyrical descriptions bring fresh poignancy to well-worn scenes of exile, though her narrative slackens a little on foreign terrain ... Land regains traction when it returns to Ireland and to its mythic theme.
It is not surprising that hunger would be a theme of Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeous and sweeping tenth novel, taking place, as it does, in the decade after the Great Famine. Hunger, colonialism, displacement and, above all, the land itself pulse through this stunning work ... It is ambitious, wide and deep ... O’Farrell’s luminous prose sweeps us from place to place and from time to time; her metaphors are from the natural world ... There is great sadness in this book, and much sorrow, and a particularly disturbing extended scene of an exorcism, but Land is deeply moving and never depressing, lightened by myth, nature and song.
Showcases her genius for infusing painful stories with flashes of pure bliss ... Provokes that same unlikely combination in ways that annihilate critiques of her work as 'grief porn' ... In Land, O’Farrell posits that the fate of one family, with all of its human-size joys and heartaches, cannot be extricated from history on a mass scale ... There is misery in this, but there’s also so much more.
This is a rich, irresistible story ... O’Farrell is not just telling a 19th-century story, she’s tilling the fields of those great Victorian novelists who understood that the only thing that redeems the contrivance of an unlikely coincidence is the pleasurable shock it gives us ... By the end of Land, no matter what your ancestry, these are your people ... Tender.
O’Farrell is expansive, full of vigor; her characters may die of plague or starve in famines, but she appears to be enjoying herself ... O’Farrell excels at world-building ... Through its characters, the book stages an argument about the virtues of various types of maps—those that are measured, those that are recollected, those that are dreamed. Some of these approaches require meticulous scholarship and technical proficiency; others, an attunement to the invisible realms of feeling and folklore. The characters’ distinct perspectives overlap to build the world that is the novel. All are useful, all are partial, and none reverse the country’s losses. Rather, the facts ground the fiction, the fiction enlivens the facts, and both work together to suggest that the pursuit of resurrecting the past and the pursuit of telling a good story can, in some cases, be one and the same.
Great period novels balance larger historical context with personal details and textures, and at first Land feels poised to do just that ... But as the novel proceeds, this promise largely dissolves ... O’Farrell leaves these relationships and their wider ramifications mostly unexplored ... O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout ... At its best, Land evokes weighty, time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s Red Shift, drawing associative lines across eras and grappling with the long afterlives of colonial violence. But it is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.
May not achieve the heights of Hamnet’s popularity, but it demonstrates that her breakout hit was no fluke. At once canny and artful, Land manages to transport its reader to a distant time and place while simultaneously alluding obliquely to the concerns of today ... At its most moving, Land charts how the legacy of Tomás and Phina’s losses causes the small family they have created to splinter ... Blood, rather than land, is where the real power of this novel resides.
Land is really rather mawkish ... The writing is not good enough even to satisfy our ears. Descriptions are allowed to go long in the hope that they will be made more vivid, but they are often generic ... Land is a book of feeling, not thinking. Reading this kind of mediocre yearning fiction is like chopping onions: a bit of a chore, and you might be made to cry a little, but the tears are soon dried, and you feel no lasting sadness or dilation of the soul. What was that all about? Anyway, almost time for dinner.
Sometimes – rarely – there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page. A book to be consumed slowly, rolling every sentence in your mind and heart. Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Land is such a book ... I love all of O’Farrell’s novels, but I think Land might be her finest. It’s as layered as the place she writes about. It’s epic and intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.
An ambitious, emotionally rich work that emphasizes the unseen bonds between people and their environment ... What distinguishes Land from more conventional historical fiction is the way O’Farrell blends realism with folklore, spirituality, and mystery ... Perhaps the greatest achievement of Land is the way O’Farrell transforms landscape into something almost sentient ... Land is not a fast-moving work of literary fiction, nor is it interested in tidy resolutions. It asks readers to surrender to mood, imagery, and emotional accumulation rather than straightforward plot mechanics. For those willing to move at its deliberate pace, the rewards are substantial. O’Farrell has written yet another haunting and deeply humane story about survival, silence, and the stories embedded within the earth itself.
Unequivocally a novel about Ireland, the Irish and the Irish diasporic experience. It is also (impressively, considering she must have been writing, or at least promoting, her Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hamnet while working on this) her most far-reaching, ambitious novel to date; The Marriage Portrait (2022) operated on a smaller canvas ... Existing fans (and they are legion) will know not to expect sparse description and buttoned-up emotions. More is more with O’Farrell, a writer of vividity, deep feeling and empathy. Her preferred storytelling mode is in an urgent, present-tense, omniscient third-person ... Yes, perhaps Land occasionally veers close to being overblown or grandiose or could have shed a storyline. But as a story it has such heart.
Unlike Hardy or Wodehouse, O’Farrell does not feel the need to create interesting characters, so, as one predictable disaster follows another, we feel no closer to feeling much sympathy, except for their dear old dog.
Her most ambitious and dynamic work to date. At the sentence level, its craftsmanship sings; her prose is as lush and imbued with the miraculous as it is lived-in and inviting ... But the book’s gaze is capacious and at times wayward ... Although the novel’s center does not quite hold, O’Farrell’s emotional intelligence — the heart and heat of her characters — braces this sometimes unwieldy chronicle.
Expansive ... Existing fans (and they are legion) will know not to expect sparse description and buttoned-up emotions. More is more with O’Farrell, a writer of vividity, deep feeling and empathy. Her preferred storytelling mode is in an urgent, present-tense, omniscient third-person ... Perhaps Land occasionally veers close to being overblown or grandiose or could have shed a storyline. But as a story it has such heart.
Lengthy and ambitious ... Should be approached less as a conventional novel and more as an act of traditional storytelling ... However, this narrative choice also means that Land is very light on dialogue, with speech being more frequently reported than rendered on the page. This makes the book very dense, while also reducing the opportunities for O’Farrell to reveal rather than explain character ... As a novel Land feels somehow uncomfortable in its own skin, neither fable nor history nor family saga, the voice of its seanchaí not consistently or confidently inhabited. But with its narrator absent and its characters brought fully to life by actors, it will doubtless make an epic and richly textured film.
With Land, her tenth novel, O’Farrell owns her Irish heritage. It is unequivocally a novel about Ireland, the Irish and the Irish diasporic experience. It is also (impressively, considering she must have been writing, or at least promoting, her Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hamnet while working on this) her most far-reaching, ambitious novel to date ... Yes, perhaps Land occasionally veers close to being overblown or grandiose or could have shed a storyline. But as a story it has such heart ... With Land, O’Farrell might snag a Booker nomination, an accolade that has so far (unaccountably, to fans) eluded her.
Once again, O’Farrell has created a story replete with intensely emotive renderings of family stresses, strains and loss ... In what strives to be a tour-de-force sequence but feels awkwardly inserted into an otherwise conventional historical novel, O’Farrell recounts a millennia-spanning warp and whirl of localised human experience in lyrical paragraphs ... O’Farrell offers all of this in an unceasingly ardent storytelling style. But heartstrings can only be pulled so much, for so long, before they loosen or snap.
When you might think the novel is in danger of disappearing in a mystical Celtic mist, O’Farrell doubles down. ... O’Farrell will take the narration inside the mind of a dog, or an unborn child making out the shape of a handprint ... The wonder of O’Farrell’s novel - easily her most ambitious - is that it soars above every one of the risks I have listed and to which any less ridiculously talented novelist would have succumbed. Her great-great-grandfather – who also helped map post-Famine Ireland - would be proud of her.
O’Farrell casts her net back millennia to tell the story of the land, its ancient people and the ethereal—even supernatural—power of the pool. As in Hamnet, O’Farrell skillfully oscillates among the points of view of her characters, sometimes taking wing as a skylark or nosing around as the loyal family dog in order to reveal an aspect of the story the human characters cannot perceive. As ever, O’Farrell’s prose is a gift: Her language is lush and muscular, particularly in descriptions of landscape and foliage.
The simplicity of its title masks the depth of insight and emotion that makes Maggie O'Farrell's novel Land such an encompassing reading experience ... She's chosen to record her representation of Irish life on a much larger canvas than she did the world of William Shakespeare in Hamnet, but the same qualities of empathy and grace she displayed in that beautiful novel reappear here in abundance.
As relayed through beautiful passages about nature, the land abides as its occupants change, and the descriptions of music and its emotional impact soar. Readers will gain a whole new perspective on mapmaking.
