Land by Maggie O’Farrell: A Review from the Place Where We are Putting Down Roots
I am writing this on a balcony in the southern Peloponnese, with the Messenian Gulf spread out in front of me and the scent of grilled fish drifting up from the restaurant below. My copy of Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is sitting on the table, the spine already cracked, pages warped slightly by salt air and the humidity of a Greek June.
This feels like the right place to read this book. Because while Land is set in post-famine Ireland and follows Tomás, a taciturn Ordnance Surveyor mapping stolen territory in the late 1800s, its true subject is what it means to make a home after everything has been taken from
you.
My partner and I have spent the past few years looking at houses in the Peloponnese. We have fallen for a derilict stone property tucked into a row of a dozen others, a short walk from the sea. Tomorrow we leave for Athens; on Wednesday we fly back to Bordeaux. But we’ll return in August to start the paperwork, to claim a corner of Greece as our own. So when I read O’Farrell’s descriptions of displacement - of families scraped raw by hunger and colonial violence, clinging to soil that no longer wants to feed them - I feel the irony and the privilege acutely. My own search for home is voluntary, fortunate, almost embarrassingly easy by comparison.
But the longing feels universal.
This will be my umpteenth house move across eight countries, an unlikely beneficiary of a diaspora from a place that no longer exists. Ironically, although I only visited Ireland once, the Irish heritage passed down by my mother has given me something the characters in O’Farrell’s pages were mercilessly denied: the freedom to move across Europe, to settle, to belong, to choose.
Land is a departure from the tight, domestic intensity of Hamnet. Here O’Farrell is working on an epic scale, tracing generations of an Irish family across more than four hundred pages, cutting backwards and forwards in time with the confidence of a writer who trusts her reader to follow. The land itself is the novel’s most vivid character - stubborn, beautiful, contested, soaked in blood and memory. There are moments of physical beauty in her prose: descriptions of bogland, of coastline, of the way light falls on a cottage doorway. She makes you understand why people will fight and die for a patch of earth that, to an outsider, looks like nothing more than rock and heather.
For someone who runs literary retreats in Greece, this question of place and belonging is not abstract. At Naxos Creative, I spend my summers watching strangers arrive in Greece and, within days, reorder their internal geography. Greece does something to people - it helps them open. And now, it seems, it has cracked me open too. I have spent years creating what turned out to be temporary homes; now I am trying to build a permanent one. O’Farrell would understand this. Her novel insists that home is not just architecture or ownership; it is an act of continuous imagination. Tomás maps the land but cannot fully possess it. The family survives but never quite stops grieving. There is no tidy resolution, no closing of the wound. Instead there is endurance, adaptation, the quiet stubbornness of people who refuse to be erased.
If I have a criticism, it is that the novel’s sweep occasionally outpaces its intimacy. There are so many lives to track that some characters feel glimpsed rather than inhabited. But when O’Farrell lingers - on a mother’s grief, on a lover’s hesitation, on the texture of a coat against winter skin - she is unmatched. I’m saving Land to finish on the flight back to France. And when I return to Greece in August, I’ll bring it with me - not as a guide, but as a companion. A reminder that every home is built on layered history, that every act of settling is also an act of hope, and that the land, in the end, outlasts all of us.
Nola
Land is published by Tinder Press.