Land by Maggie O’Farrell – Book Review by The Bookish Elf
There is a moment near the start of the new novel where a ten-year-old boy stands on a windswept hillock holding a surveying chain in hands gone scarlet from cold, while his father waves at him from the other end of a measuring line. Liam can barely make out his father in the wet Atlantic mist. That image of a small child and a stubborn adult, separated by chain and weather and several centuries of grief, more or less tells you what Land by Maggie O’Farrell is going to do to you over the next four hundred pages. A country still in mourning The year is 1865. The Great Hunger is recent enough that the bones are still settling in the ditches and that everyone over the age of twenty has lost someone. Tomás, the map-maker, has been sent by the British Ordnance Survey to record a peninsula on the westernmost tip of Ireland. His task is technical, but his motive is private. He wants the maps to bear witness. And he wants the names …
