Following the massive success of novels such as ‘The Marriage Portrait’ and ‘Hamnet’, Maggie O’Farrell returns with a sweeping, multi-viewpoint historical epic set in Ireland. The action begins in 1865, roughly a decade after the devastation of the Great Hunger. Tomás and his ten-year-old son are traversing a windswept Atlantic peninsula while working on the British Ordnance project to map Ireland. But when Tomás has an unsettling, almost mystical encounter at an ancient spring, he is utterly shattered by the event and vows to abandon his work. On returning to his wife and two daughters in Dublin, Tomás uproots his family with notions of living off the land in a rural environment. As is often the wont with such quixotic notions, however, things don’t exactly run to plan. O’Farrell throws all manner of good stuff into this heady brew of a novel including, an exorcism, the origin of Irish Wolfhounds, rapacious landlords, the tension that exists between organised religion and the worship of the physical world, and much more besides. She even finds time to dip back a millennium or two to trace the ancient history of Ireland (there’s some scenes with a talking fish that, against all odds, kind of make sense). At its heart, the novel uses Tomás’s family to explore the fate of an entire country, taking in migration, colonialism and rebellion. But such expansive themes are never at the expense of the intimacy that the author manages to capture between all the main players. A bravura piece of writing. RM

Published by Tinder Press