After Hamnet's Triumph, Maggie O'Farrell Proves Lightning Strikes Twice

When Maggie O’Farrell’s eighth novel, Hamnet, became an international bestseller, adapted into an Oscar-winning film, and claimed a spot on seemingly every literary accolade list, there was a natural question hanging over her career: Can she do it again?

The answer, it turns out, is yes—just not in the way anyone might have predicted. Her tenth novel, Land, may not reach the stratospheric heights of Hamnet’s popularity, but it does something arguably more important: it proves her breakout wasn’t a fluke. The book demonstrates a writer working at the height of her powers, balancing lush, evocative prose with page-turning narrative momentum in ways that feel both artful and deeply intentional.

What’s particularly clever about Land is how O’Farrell manages to transport readers across centuries and continents while keeping one eye fixed firmly on contemporary concerns. The novel draws inspiration from her own family history—specifically her great-great-grandfather, who helped create the first ordnance maps of Ireland. Through the fictional Tomás, a surveyor working for the British in post-Famine Ireland, O’Farrell explores themes of generational trauma, colonial oppression, and the way our parents’unspoken losses ripple through our own lives. The novel opens in 1865, when Ireland was still reeling from the Great Famine, and follows Tomás, his wife Phina, and their children across generations. It’s heavy material, but O’Farrell wields it with restraint and grace.

The narrative engine here is what keeps you reading. There’s Tomás’s frantic attempt to prevent Phina from being shipped to Australia. There’s his insistence on moving his family into a roofless cottage on land he believes will somehow redeem them. There’s the tension between his desire for his eldest son Liam to follow in his mapmaking footsteps and Liam’s own yearning for scholarly life with the parish priest. And there’s Enda, their daughter, who wants nothing more than to help her father chart wild, remote places—but Tomás refuses to even consider it because she’s a girl. Every time the narrative threatens to drift, O’Farrell sets a fresh hook.

The novel’s supernatural elements—a mystical copse with a sacred spring, a youngest child born on the hillside with psychic abilities—feel like the weakest link in the chain. But fortunately, they remain backgrounded throughout. Where Land truly soars is in its exploration of how small, random circumstances, misunderstandings, and sheer bad luck can fracture families. In one early section, young Phina’s father returns from Canada searching for her only surviving relative, but the workhouse has renamed her from the highfalutin Seraphina to Frances—deemed more appropriate for someone of her station. These moments of cruel arbitrariness, layered across generations, feel far more potent than any hint of the supernatural ever could.

At its core, Land argues that blood—not soil—is where the real power resides. The yearning of separated families animates the novel far more convincingly than any notion of sacred land. It’s a distinctly human story told through an intimate family saga, grounded in a specific historical moment yet speaking directly to how trauma echoes forward across time. If Hamnet was O’Farrell’s breakthrough, Land is proof she’s only getting better at this.