Surely Maggie O’Farrell’s star could not be much higher following Hamnet? But, with the publication of this, her 10th novel, it seems certain to climb even farther. In Land, O’Farrell transports us to the west of Ireland in 1865. A cartographer, Tomás, and his son Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole country. But the land has been blighted and hollowed out by the Great Hunger, and after a strange encounter in a copse, Tomás returns changed, and resolved to toil no longer for the British soldiers who command him. To claim his wages for his mother and sisters, Liam must complete his father’s maps without attracting the soldiers’ suspicion. So begins a magisterial multigenerational epic inspired by O’Farrell’s great-great-grandfather, who worked on the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland at this time. With haunting vividness and humanity, it conjures a nation blighted by catastrophe, and a family trying to find their way afterwards, caught in the crosshairs of history. Commingling colonisation, rebellion, love, loss and survival, it is a novel to sink into, as intricate as a map, as multilayered and mysterious as the land it depicts – confirming O’Farrell as a writer at the height of her powers.