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This month, we’re reading two novels that wrestle with troubling episodes of political history in Ireland and Venezuela.

Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 400 pp., $32, June 2026)

This month, we’re reading two novels that wrestle with troubling episodes of political history in Ireland and Venezuela.

Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 400 pp., $32, June 2026)

Maggie O’Farrell hardly needs an introduction after the extraordinary success of her 2020 novel, Hamnet. But if that book is known for its specificity, its ability to imagine the minutiae of William Shakespeare’s family life, her latest novel turns its focus outward, using one family to tell the tale of an entire nation. Land, by far O’Farrell’s most ambitious work, is an epic of Ireland, one that spans continents and millennia, all while remaining deeply rooted in one plot of earth on an unnamed Irish peninsula.

The core of the novel takes place after the Great Famine of the 1840s, which killed around 1 million Irish people and led more than 2 million more to emigrate. Tomás, who survived those years, has been hired as a cartographer by the “redcoats” to help complete Britain’s Ordnance Survey of 1865. His role is “to distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn.” His young son is his apprentice, and after an alarming encounter at a well in an ancient wood, he moves his entire family from Dublin to a homestead in the remote valley, scarred from the famine, where the pair carried out their mapping.

Yet Land also seems to touch nearly all of Ireland’s history and national lore: its colonization by the British, the mass exodus, the loss of Gaelic, Christianization, folk music, and its transformation into an agrarian society. (Only around 11 percent of Ireland remains forested, the third-lowest amount in the European Union.) At times, the novel reads almost like a medieval chronicle, as it moves across time, crop seasons, and invasions. In O’Farrell’s omniscient narration, we get the perspectives of not just family members and ancestors, but faraway figures and even objects: a skylark; a Roman general who chooses not to invade; and........

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