“And when we die, we surrender our bodies to the earth and we become earth. It is the end of one story but the beginning of another.”
“So now she waits. She finds herself to be the woman in all stories, in all ballads and myths, waiting for her man to return – from battle, from sea, from mountain and, in her case, from forest.”
Maggie O’Farrell’s Land (Knopf 2026) is absolutely beautiful. Kissed with a bit of magic and folklore, the novel opens in 1865, with Liam, a ten-year-old boy, and his father, Tomas, working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map Ireland. Tomas is dedicated and focused, his maps will show the impact the Great Hunger had on the land. But something happens when they encounter a previously unmapped copse with a wellspring, and neither of them or the rest of their family will ever be the same.
A brief section of the novel goes back in time and provides the history of the copse and a foundation for the lore surrounding it. Brith’s father has gone missing. She finds his ring in a stream. A fish demands it back. She refuses. Brith’s subsequent tragedy brought me to tears. This is not the first novel I’ve read this Booker season with an ancient woman found preserved in the bog, but it is the first with an Irish Wolfhound. The connection with the dog, from Brith’s father to Brith, to Liam’s sisters with Bran, was one of my favorite ties to the land.
I mentioned while reading that Land reminded me of everything I loved about Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, which was my favorite of its Booker cycle, and I stand by that. Land starts and ends with a man of few words, but the stories the land tells are spread throughout. I loved it, and I did add it to my Booker predictions. I didn’t want to remove any of the previous picks, but I did include it because this is a beautiful novel.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 