After the colossal success with readers that Hamnet (2020) had, and its subsequent film adaptation in 2025, directed by Chloé Zhao (starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal), -in which it portrayed the drama that William Shakespeare went through losing his young son, and how he poured the pain into the creation of the play Hamlet– the writer Maggie O’Farrell has once again captured the attention of the literary world. This time, for a new novel titled Land.
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After Hamnet, the native of Coleraine, Northern Ireland, published the novel The Married Portrait (2023), where -just like in Hamnet– she once again delved into the cracks of history to tell the pain and the most intimate part of the characters. That time, about the unfortunate marriage of Lucrezia de Medici, forced to marry -just entering adolescence- the duke Alfonso de Ferrara, in 16th century Italy.
And in Land, O’Farrell looks back again, but this time with one foot in her own family history. In the author’s own words on her Instagram profile: “It’s a book I’ve wanted to write for a long time. A few years ago I discovered that one of my ancestors worked for the Ordnance Survey in creating the first maps of Ireland in the 19th century, a finding that led me to follow his trail, both in the landscapes and in the archives.”
“As often happens in fiction, Land brings together some of my lifelong interests: cartography, sacred wells, archaeology, and the intertwined roots of colonialism and migration. (…) I hope you enjoy it.”
The volume has already appeared in English and has begun to receive its first reviews. The prestigious The New York Times commented: “Land is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule.”
“Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s tenth novel, is set in 1860s Ireland. More than a decade has passed since the Great Famine killed over a million people and forced even more into exile, and the landscape is dotted with empty villages and overflowing graves. Tomás —an Irish cartographer working for the British ‘redcoats’— and his young son, Liam, are mapping a remote peninsula on the country’s west coast when Tomás has a sudden and revealing experience at a pre-Christian sacred spring.”
“Like much of the Irish-British author’s previous work, including her most famous book, Hamnet (2020) —adapted into film in 2025 by Chloé Zhao—, Land is a historical novel imbued with O’Farrell’s characteristic interest in absorbing family relationships. The first half plants the seeds of a challenging and multigenerational reckoning with the British Empire and, to some extent, with the Catholic Church. We encounter a wind-swept landscape; a threatening and unnamed viscount; a kind widow representing the entire grieving people of the land; a condescending priest. O’Farrell takes us on a lively and deep immersion into the prehistory of the land: a place of hill forts, druids, wanderers, and Irish greyhounds, where virgins are ritually sacrificed to prevent bad weather.”
However, the NYT also highlights the novel’s shortcomings. “O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and exuberant throughout, and there are some moving passages told from the perspective of Phina’s youngest nonverbal son, Eugene. But the problems with Land stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its main characters. They are all impeccable. Tomás loses his mind, and his other daughter, Rose, resents her siblings for leaving her behind on the peninsula; but the real darkness in the novel lies outside the family core: in the redcoats, the viscount, the church. The evils of imperialism do not require their victims, real or imagined, to be pure and incorruptible, especially when their own migrations make them the dominant presence in other colonies.”
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“At its best, Land evokes weighty novels and time jumps like Alan Garner’s Red Shift, tracing associative lines across eras and confronting the long aftermaths of colonial violence. However, it deflates due to characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too superficial to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel raises at the start.”
On the other hand, it was also reviewed by The Guardian, and its view is rather mixed. “The novel begins with an epigraph: the word ‘seanchaí’ and its definition, here presented as ‘custodian of tradition, historian’ and ‘reciter of oral tradition; traditional storyteller.’ This is clearly the role O’Farrell wishes to assume in this book, and it explains much about the narrative and its construction: the fabulist elements interspersed among realistic passages; her occasional direct address to the reader; the use of coincidence (and near-fatal ones) as dramatic turning points; an irregularity in the passage of time, which speeds up and slows down several times; the use of clichéd phrases like ‘Liam sits upright,’ ‘a fight breaks out,’ and ‘luck is on his side’; and a point of view that oscillates between human characters, two dogs, an unborn child, a house, the land itself, and an omniscient perspective broad enough to predict the future and even, at one point, list world events occurring simultaneously with the narration. These elements suggest that Land should be approached less as a conventional novel and more as an act of traditional storytelling.”
“However, this narrative choice also means that Land uses very little dialogue, as conversations are more often narrated than depicted on the page. This makes the book very dense, while reducing O’Farrell’s opportunities to reveal, rather than explain, the characters: it is by hearing them speak that we truly get to know them, and without enough dialogue, many characters don’t feel fully complete, making it difficult to follow them from tragedy to tragedy. There is a clear sense of ‘and then…’ in the story: events unfold episodically, and while this may be true in life, fiction needs a sense of causality to give it meaning and shape.”
The Guardian adds a detail: it is very likely that we will see Land adapted for the big screen, and the writing of this novel apparently is designed for that. “O’Farrell co-wrote the film adaptation of her novel Hamnet, which has been nominated for several awards, and the rights to Land have already been acquired by the same production company. There are scenes that give the feeling that the characters’ movements are described from an external visual perspective, as if writing a brief action sequence in a script: ‘Adjusts the hat… and then leaves’; ‘Tomás nods once… and then dismisses her with a brusque gesture.’”
Translated into Spanish, the novel will be published in our language by the Spanish house Libros del Asteroide, the same that has published O’Farrell’s other novels. At least in Spain, it will reach stores in February 2027, and probably a few months later it will arrive in Chile. We will have to wait, then, to meet the Northern Irish author again.
“For me, fiction arises from the unknown, in this case, from the many things in Ireland’s history, especially the 19th century, that puzzled me and filled me with questions -the author said in an interview with The Guardian-. The main one was how such a disaster was allowed to happen so close to the center of one of the richest empires in the world. So, the story of the land was born from a feeling of bewilderment and outrage, driven by the few details I knew about my great-great-grandfather, a hand-drawn map, a photograph, and a myth that turned out to contain more truth than we ever imagined.”
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