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?”
