Written by Maggie O’Farrell · Narrated by Dane Whyte O’Hara
The book that started Bertie’s Books. An ambitious, sprawling novel with superb writing and plenty to admire, but the number of storylines, some predictability and a nearly seventeen-hour running time made it a rather uneven experience for me.
The Story
Land begins in Ireland in 1865, not long after the Great Hunger, with Tomás and his young son Liam working on the Ordnance Survey project to map the country. An unsettling discovery sends Tomás — and eventually the novel itself — in unexpected directions. Hachette UK
There’s no shortage of ambition. The story spans generations, places, and periods, mixing family history with landscape, memory, loss, and elements of folklore.
My problem was that the further it travelled, the less connected I felt to it.
I admire Maggie O’Farrell enormously — Hamnet remains the obvious point of comparison for me — but Land never had the same emotional grip. Instead of being swept along by the expanding story, I increasingly felt as though I was being moved from one piece of it to another.
There are some striking individual moments, but as a whole I found it too disjointed.
The Narrator
Dane Whyte O’Hara has a substantial job here: the audiobook runs for 16 hours and 47 minutes, with a large cast of characters and a story moving across generations. Kirkus Reviews
I thought he handled it well. The different voices are clear, the Irish setting feels natural rather than performed, and the narration itself never made me struggle with the book.
If anything, a good narrator helped me stay with it when the story was beginning to lose me.
The Waffleometer
At nearly seventeen hours, Land was always going to present the Waffleometer with a substantial body of evidence.
Length alone isn’t waffle, of course. A seventeen-hour audiobook can fly by if the story keeps pulling you forward.
This one didn’t.
The sprawling structure, shifts in direction and sheer amount of material increasingly made me feel that the novel was taking a very long route to wherever it was going.
Scores
📖 Story: 3/5
I liked a lot, but the number of storylines and a certain amount of predictability held it back for me.
✍️ Writing: 5/5
No hesitation there. Even when the story frustrated me, O’Farrell’s writing didn’t.
🎧 Narration: 4.5/5
Dane Whyte O’Hara handles a complicated novel extremely well.
🎙️ Audiobook Experience: 4/5
🧇 Waffleometer: 3/5
A fair amount of meandering — although at nearly seventeen hours, there was plenty of opportunity for it.
The Verdict
Land is a difficult book for me to dismiss because it has plenty to admire.
It’s ambitious, imaginative and steeped in landscape and history. And Dane Whyte O’Hara gives it a strong audiobook performance.
But admiration and enjoyment aren’t quite the same thing.
I kept thinking about how much I’d loved Hamnet, and waiting for Land to exert that same emotional pull. For me, it never did.
Instead, the story became increasingly sprawling and disjointed, and at almost seventeen hours I found myself rather more conscious of the journey than absorbed by it.
Still, Land has one distinction none of the other books can take away from it:
It was where Bertie’s Books began.