Review: Land - Maggie O'Farrell

Genre: Historical Fiction

Published: Knopf, June 2026 My Rating: 3/5 stars

"To map is to assume power."

Fair warning; this review actually upset me… I was desperately willing (and expecting) to love this book based off my previous experience with the author and the almost unanimous 5-star rating this has gotten from friends and reviewers that I trust. Therefore, my 3-star experience almost feels like a personal failure on my part… The important take-away here is this: 3-stars is not a bad rating, and this book has a lot of great qualities. I just happen to be quite particular about my historical fiction, and made a couple of choices that I just don’t vibe with…

The Story:

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

What I loved:

I want to keep this fairly short, because I don’t have anything new to say, that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by other reviewers who rated this higher than I did. Maggie O’Farrell’s prose is beautiful and there’s clearly a deep passion towards Ireland and the Irish history that fueled her inspiration for this story. Although the setting is historical, there are clear (sometimes heavy handed) nods to current events that make the story feel timeless.

Compared to her previous books, this might also be O’Farrell’s most ambitious novel in scope. I respect that effort and think she has the talent to pull it off. She just didn’t quite do it with Land, in my opinion.

What I didn’t love:

Scope is only part of the issue and the easiest way to explain what didn’t work for me, is by comparing it to what I loved in Hamnet and I Am I Am I Am. Both of those books felt like I was experiencing the events depicted up-close and personally. Hamnet, with its eye for detail, completely pulled me into its historical setting and felt deeply authentic in its depiction of a time and place. Land’s Ireland on the other hand, felt like watching a Hollywood-adapted reenactment of the events, rather than the events itself. Characters were just too flat and plentiful (covering several generations) to feel like people, rather than roles. Their conversations and expressed sensibilities felt too modern and too “scripted”, as if written with an audience in mind. The descriptions of the titular land itself felt distinctly romanticized and seemed to hit every cliché about Irish historical culture, which made it come across like set décor, rather than a true living place. Imagine I were to write an “authentic account” of the historical Netherlands, but in every description I had to mention mills, wooden shoes and cheese-making. Namedropping a traditional dish, occupation or belief is fine, but doing so every chance you get becomes too much and feels disingenuous.

That Hollywood-adaptation-feeling carried over into the story-events as well. The intimacy of Hamnet’s tragedy was what had me bawling over it. The ordinariness of the happenings in I Am I Am I Am made them so terrifyingly relatable. Opposite, the spectacle of tragedy in Land was what kept me at a distance. By no means am I saying that you cannot write about historical tragedies in an impactful way, but these events need room to breathe and characters need room to grow for it to <i>land</i> (pun not intended…) Otherwise, you risk ending up in a genre that I hate more than any other: “tragedy-porn”. Land luckily isn’t quite there, but does some serious edging in that direction.

Overall, I didn’t hate this, but the gap between my expectations and the reality of my experience could fit an entire magical copse. I am not burned on Maggie O’Farrell either, as one of her greater talents as an author is how different all of her books feel. That range is great, but it also means inevitably that there will be some works by her that I love more than others. So far, I’ve loved 2 (Hamnet and I Am I Am I Am) and have been mixed/indifferent on two others (Land and The Marriage Portrait). Let’s see which way her next release will break that tie.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.