Category Maggie O’Farrell

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Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland

Set in the aftermath of the famine, the Hamnet author’s family saga folds in myth and folklore

‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”

In bitter weather, Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are mapping a peninsula – perhaps Dunmore Head in County Kerry, though O’Farrell doesn’t specify – using surveying poles and measuring chains. Tomás is in the pay of the English, who need him not only for his surveying ability and draughtsmanship, but for his language skills: they cannot easily find out from Irish speakers the names of places, or determine who owns what. It is Tomás’s job to untangle complex local legends and obscure toponyms to create a usable map, and he wants to ensure that the marks left by the famine – the empty houses and graveyards – are recorded on it, though the “redcoats” sign their names to his work. A famine survivor himself, scarred by unspeakable trauma, he tolerates this: as we later discover, assisting the surveyors and learning their trade was his route out of the workhouse. He might not have survived otherwise.

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Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’

From a young age, the author was told that one of her ancestors had drawn some of the first maps of Ireland. Then she found a photograph, and embarked on a journey to discover his story

Every family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary person in unspecified period dress – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – striding pensively about fields and mountains, pen in hand. On summer holidays, I would stare out of the window of our red car as Donegal or Galway rolled by and wonder that such a task could be achieved. How did one man set about drawing a map of a whole country, of these towns and strands and trees and rivers?

All myths comprise a great deal of fanciful embroidery through which runs the distinct thread of truth: time and retelling will always refract reality. This mapper preyed on my mind. I thought about him, always, when I travelled around Ireland. I thought about him in my final year of school, when my geography exam required me to analyse a square of an unknown map. I wanted, as I often do, to know more, about his life, his work, who he had been and how he had mapped.

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More heartache than Hamnet?: Maggie O’Farrell’s best books – ranked!

As her Women’s prize-winning novel heads to the Oscars, we rate the author’s best work – from tales of new motherhood to a life-affirming memoir of mortality

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she’s actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O’Farrell’s second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is “no longer with us” to mark a more permanent absence; in fact, Sinead has simply been thrown over, and it is in the details of the collapse of her relationship with Marcus that the novel most engages. Hints of the gothic ghost story deepen one of the main takeaways, which is that Marcus consists almost entirely of red flags.

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Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

Maggie O’Farrell, Yann Martel and Julian Barnes are among the authors publishing new novels this year

The beginning of the books calendar is usually dominated by debuts, but January 2026 sees releases from some of the year’s biggest authors. Known for his surreally bittersweet short stories, George Saunders has written only one novel so far – but that one won the Booker prize. The follow-up to 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil (Bloomsbury) focuses on an unquiet spirit called Jill who helps others pass over from life to whatever comes next. She is called to the deathbed of an oil tycoon who is rapidly running out of time to face up to his ecological crimes, in a rallying cry for human connection and environmental action. Ali Smith’s Glyph (Hamish Hamilton) is a companion to 2024’s Gliff, and promises to tell a story initially hidden in that previous novel. Expect fables, siblings, phantoms and horses in a typically playful shout of resistance against war, genocide and the increasingly hostile social discourse. And in Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape), Julian Barnes announces his own – this blend of memoir and fiction, exploring memory, illness, mortality and love across the decades, will be his last book. “Your presence has delighted me,” he assures the reader. “Indeed, I would be nothing without you.”

The Hamnet adaptation hits UK cinemas in January, but Maggie O’Farrell’s next novel isn’t out until June. Land (Tinder), a multigenerational saga which opens in 19th-century Ireland in the wake of the famine, is inspired by her own family history and centres on a man tasked with mapping the country for the Ordnance Survey. There’ll be much anticipation, too, for The Things We Never Say from Elizabeth Strout (Viking, May). The ultra-prolific Strout is adored for her interconnected novels, but this story of a man with a secret is a standalone, introducing characters we’ve never met before. In John of John (Picador, May) Douglas Stuart, author of much-loved Booker winner Shuggie Bain, portrays a young gay man returning home from art school to the lonely croft on the Hebridean island where he grew up. And September sees a new novel from Irish writer Sebastian Barry: The Newer World (Faber) follows Costa winner Days Without End and A Thousand Moons in transporting the reader to late 19th-century America in the aftermath of the Civil War.

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