It is not surprising that hunger would be a theme of Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeous and sweeping tenth novel, taking place, as it does, in the decade after the Great Famine. Hunger, colonialism, displacement and, above all, the land itself pulse through this stunning work ... It is ambitious, wide and deep ... O’Farrell’s luminous prose sweeps us from place to place and from time to time; her metaphors are from the natural world ... There is great sadness in this book, and much sorrow, and a particularly disturbing extended scene of an exorcism, but Land is deeply moving and never depressing, lightened by myth, nature and song.
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A soaring, visionary narrative that connects the known world to the misty realms of Celtic legend ... As the struggling men and women in Land endure defeat and distrust victory, it is their frailty as much as their strength that wins our sympathy and holds our attention ... Her lyrical descriptions bring fresh poignancy to well-worn scenes of exile, though her narrative slackens a little on foreign terrain ... Land regains traction when it returns to Ireland and to its mythic theme.
Showcases her genius for infusing painful stories with flashes of pure bliss ... Provokes that same unlikely combination in ways that annihilate critiques of her work as 'grief porn' ... In Land, O’Farrell posits that the fate of one family, with all of its human-size joys and heartaches, cannot be extricated from history on a mass scale ... There is misery in this, but there’s also so much more.
