In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s most famous work, the surrounding environment is a character. The house whistling with draughts and eddies of air; Agnes tending to the bees, “a blackish stain spread throughout the branches that vibrates and quivers with outrage”; the forest with paths “that led travellers from their route, their intentions”… Nature is at once the benign womb and the malevolent presence whose intentions are unknown. It is this visible mood that filmmaker Chloe Zhao captured and amplified in her Oscar-winning 2025 film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, which was based on the same book.
Land, O’Farrell’s new novel, opens with a 10-year-old boy, Liam, standing on a hillock while holding a surveying pole, as his father, Tomás, a little distance away, signals something with his arm. Tomás is a cartographer, so topographical details are of course important—a rocky outcrop of likely volcanic origin, a fissure on a slope, a dense copse with a “reasonable-sized stream”… Each has a different relationship with the land they’re standing on. Liam, cold, wet, hungry, fidgety, would rather be home. Tomás is determined that the boy shadows him and learns his trade. They’re in Ireland, and the year is 1865. Tomás is in the employ of the British soldiers, the redcoats. A few days later, in a state of delirium, Tomás announces to Liam that he’s now determined to correct the cartographic erasure carried out by the colonisers. Tomás’s state opens up a chasm between father and son that determines the course of the rest of their lives.
Land, as the title suggests, is a story about land, of Ireland and the Great Hunger, of starvation and exploitation, the colonisers and those colonised, of a family of six whose lives are shaped by a guilt-tormented patriarch’s decision to relocate them to an isolated patch on the peninsula. There’s Seraphina, Tomás’s wife, who tries to mend her husband with the same care with which she darns his clothes; Enda, their oldest daughter, bristling, restless, resentful of the narrow physical confines of her new reality, stretched taut as the strings of her fiddle; Rose, the younger daughter who’s attuned to everyone’s thinking and absorbs their miasmas; and the youngest, Eugene, silent but all-knowing. Liam turns to religion as a way to rebel against his father, and Tomás sees it for what it is.
In our goldfish-brain era, it’s difficult to come cross a master of the slow prose like O’Farrell—there are paragraphs dedicated to the flow of a stream sparkling in the sunlight, the house on the hillside that Tomás decides will be their new home, the eons Liam takes to contemplate the meaning of a Latin phrase on the page in front of him, the watchful way that a newborn Eugene takes in the world… There’s not a lot of speech; you get a bird’s-eye view of the lives and inner lives of the people in the book. The sibling bond, explored with heartbreaking tenderness in Hamnet, is again a focus here, but the plot of Land allows a deeper exploration of the underlying pulls and resentments.
Land isn’t a short novel—it’s 437 pages long. It’s indulgent writing, but it is what we’ve come to expect from O’Farrell. We’ve seen that in Hamnet, and also in her 2023 novel, A Marriage Portrait, based on the 16th Century tale of a 15-year-old duchess Lucrezia Medici, who was believed to have been killed by her husband. A different kind of story altogether, but in this author’s hand even a murder plot unravels at its own sweet time. Land wants your attention, and it can hold it, too. Just be patient.
Land is published by Tinder Press; ₹634
