Land by Maggie O'Farrell

                                                                         

Hardback: 436 pages

Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, 

Publisher: Tinder Press, Headline Publishing Group 2026.

Source: Tywyn Public Library

First Sentence:  His father was ever a man of few words.

Setting:  Ireland

Review Quote: 'Magnificent... a feat of the historical imagination' INDEPENDENT

My Opinion:  Wow! What a talented storyteller Maggie O'Farrell is. She writes beautifully descriptive literary prose with cleverly woven storylines that have never disappointed me in recent years, her writing just keeps getting better.

'Land' opens in 1865 with the west coast of Ireland suffering in the aftermath of a great famine. It is the story of the life of Tomas and his family when at this time he and his son Liam were working on the formidable Ordnance Survey project to map Ireland. As the family makes its way through the trials and tribulations of life in that era we the reader share their love and loss through stories of ancient times. These Irish folklore tales blend seamlessly with the struggles the family currently face.

Maggie O'Farrell has successfully taken this period of Irish history and turned it into a literary masterpiece of storytelling. Highly recommended to everyone.

Precis Courtesy of Goodreads:

'You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow'

A spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of tragedy.

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.

Previous Reviews:    Hamnet.   Instructions for a Heatwave. The Hand That First Held Mine   The Distance Between Us  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. 

The Marriage Portrait

Author Profile

                                           

                        Photo and Biography courtesy of Official Author Website

Maggie O’Farrell is one of the most loved writers in the English language. Her debut, AFTER YOU’D GONE, marked the start of a career which has established Maggie as one of the great storytellers of our times.

From that point onwards, Maggie has enjoyed critical acclaim and received numerous literary awards. THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. HAMNET, which imagined the untold story of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was Waterstones’ Book of the Year, and was also a no. 1 bestseller.  Her 2022 novel, THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Maggie has recently co-written, with Chloé Zhao, the screenplay for HAMNET. The forthcoming film will star Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and will be directed by academy-award-winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland). Hamnet has previously been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company.Maggie is also the author of three books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO, THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK and WHEN THE STUTTER CAME TO STAY.

She was born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Currently, she lives in Edinburgh.

Photograph and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.

Goodreads - Author Profile   Maggie O'Farrell - Facebook  Amazon Author Profile

Official Author Website.  Instagram Profile

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

                                                      

 Hardback: 437 pages                                                                            

Genre:  Literary Fiction, Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Romance.

Publisher:  2024 by Faber and Faber

Source: Tywyn Library 

First Sentences: Didn't seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.

Review Quote: 'Intermezzo is perfect ... Is there a better novelist at work right now?' Observer

Favourite Quote: “Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”

Literary Awards: British Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2025), Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) Nominee for International Book (2025), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2024), The Rooster -- The Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee for Longlist (2025), She Reads Best of Award Nominee for Book of the Year and Literary Fiction (2024), Barnes & Noble Book of the Year Award Nominee (2024)

Setting: Dublin, Ireland.

My Opinion: 

The third book I have read by this Irish author and each one has been a 5* literary treat.

'Intermezzo' is an emotionally moving story of two brothers whose father has recently died leaving them both grieving in different ways and causing an estrangement between them. Actually they have never been that close anyway. Peter the much older sibling is struggling as his relationship with the love of his life is a difficult one and he finds himself turning to a much younger woman for consolation. Ironic as at the same time he is overtly critical of his brother Ivan for being romantically involved with an older woman. The character building and exploration of the dynamics between the brothers and the women in their lives tie this complex novel together perfectly.

For me this was another well-crafted contemporary relationship story from Sally Rooney, highly recommended.

 

Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Previous Review:  Beautiful World Where Are You

Author Profile: 

                                                             Courtesy of Goodreads Profile

SALLY ROONEY was born in County Mayo in the west of Ireland in 1991. She now lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017, she is the author of Conversations with Friends and the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.

Photograph and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.

Amazon Author Page.   Goodreads Profile.   

Haven by Emma Donoghue

                                                   

Hardback:  252 pages      

Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Religion,                                           

Publisher: Picador 2022

Source: Tywyn Public Library

First Sentences: Trian's stomach growls. He's not twenty yet, still growing and always hungry.

Favourite Quote: ““To travel is to turn the pages of the great book of life.” 

Review Quote: Brooding, dreamlike . . . it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars . . . Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant. ― The Observer

Setting: Skellig Michael, Ireland

Main Characters: Artt, Trian and Cormac

My Opinion:

 

With this latest novel Emma Donoghue has written a story with all the emotional intensity that we now tend to expect from her writing, but this one is so very different from her previous work. The setting for ‘Haven’ is the hostile environment of the island known as Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland. The island is best known for its Gaelic Monastery, founded between the 6C and 8C and its colonies of gannets, puffins, razorbills and grey seals. The landscape is far from welcoming as it is extremely steep and inhospitable.

Very much character driven as the reader follows the growth and development of the three characters, Artt, Trian and Cormac. The Prior, Artt and his two chosen monks are thanks to a dream of the Prior’s destined to set sail to find a remote, uninhabited island on which to set up a monastery.

A haunting tale of belief and how the men cope, or don’t as the isolation impacts on them.

It was not an easy read but I am glad I persevered, as the author’s ability to depict atmosphere and mood makes it worth the effort. 

                              

                                          Skellig Michael       

Links to Previous Reviews:  Room  The Wonder  The Pull of the Stars

Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:

In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?

Three men vow to leave the world behind them. They set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael. Haven has Emma Donoghue’s trademark world-building and psychological intensity—but this story is like nothing she has ever written before.

Author Profile:

                                           
                                                              © Una Roulston 2021. 

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, she is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). She moved to England, and in 1997 received her PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, she has earned her living as a writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with Chris Roulston and their son Finn and daughter Una.


Photograph and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.

Emma Donoghue - Official Website   Twitter Profile.   Facebook Profile

Wikipedia - Skellig Michael

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

Hardback:  291 pages                                                                                                
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical
Publisher: Picador 2016
Source: Tywyn Public Library
First Sentence: The journey was no worse than she expected.
Favourite Quote: “How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized - as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock.
Review Quote: Fans of Emma Donoghue's first novel Room will not be disappointed with The Wonder . . . a tale of claustrophobic suspense and the intense relationship between a woman and a child . . . Donoghue's masterful way with words and imagery has the reader sharing Lib's scepticism and disdain for Anna and her family's naïve religious fervour. (Red Magazine)
Literary Awards: Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2016), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction (2016)
My Opinion:  As the successful author of the masterpiece that was Room I wondered if The Wonder was going to meet my expectations. It certainly did that, using as inspiration the true life stories of young people that claimed to survive long periods without food, Emma Donoghue has created with this novel another shocking yet riveting story about a child and a disturbing life experience.  The protagonist Anna is an eleven year old Irish girl whose family are claiming she is a living miracle. The other main character is Lib Wright a nurse a veteran of the Crimean War and trained by Florence Nightingale, who accepts an assignment to watch over Anna to try and discover if what is being claimed is all a sham!

At first the novel felt slow and took time to figure out with the complications of religion, myth and superstition that had a big influence on Anna's family and their reactions to what was happening to their daughter. It was difficult to understand just how far peoples beliefs would influence them, as it seemed they were prepared to let their own child die, as they persisted in believing in miracles.

A difficult subject to write a novel about and whilst reading you cannot but help find yourself thinking about how an earth the author is going to be able to bring the novel to a satisfactory and believable ending. Well without a doubt in my mind, she has succeeded in writing a realistic yet imaginative ending.

The Wonder will appeal to readers of historical fiction, stories set in Ireland and of course fans of Emma Donoghue's excellent writing.


Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story.

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, The Wonder—inspired by numerous European and North American cases of “fasting girls” between the sixteenth century and the twentieth—is a psychological thriller about a child’s murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.



Author's Note - Transcribed from the book

The Wonder is an invented story. However, it was inspired by almost fifty cases of so-called Fasting Girls - hailed for surviving without food for long periods - in the British Isles, Western Europe and Northern America between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. These girls varied widely in age and background. Some of them (whether Protestant or Catholic) claimed a religious motive, but many didn't. There were male cases, too,though far fewer. Some of the fasters were put under surveillance for weeks on end; some started eating again, voluntarily or after being coerced, imprisoned, hospitalized, or force-fed; some died; others lived for decades, still claiming not to need food.


Video Trailer for '  The Wonder    ' Courtesy of YouTube

Author Profile

                                                                                                               Emma Donoghue © Mark Raynes Roberts, 2015. 

Emma was born on October 24th 1969 in Dublin Ireland, the youngest of eight children, of Frances and Denis Donoghue(the literary critic) She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin, and in 1997 a PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. Since the age of 23, Donoghue has earned her living as a full-time writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner, Chris Roulston and their son, Finn and daughter, Una.

Photographs, Trailer and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.


My Review of Room    Emma Donoghue - Official Website     Goodreads Author Profile

Amazon - Emma Donoghue - Author Page

Secrets of the Lighthouse by Santa Montefiore.

Paperback: 453 pages

Genre: Contemporary Romantic Fiction
Publisher:Simon and Schuster Paperback 2014 
Source: Tywyn Public Library
First Sentences: It is autumn and yet it feels more like summer.
Favourite Quotes: It matters not that they have known each other little more than a few days,for love is not of the earth, but of the eternal present that cannot be measured. It is timeless. If their love is true, they might as well have known each other forever. (Page 226)
But I realise at this moment that our earthly sojourn is a learning experience and that we are always evolving, always moving towards a greater love. (Page 430)
Review Quote: 'As well as hot men, her books are full of ghosts too. Secrets of the Lighthouse has a strong supernatural story-line' --Belfast Telegraph
Literary Award: Specsavers National Book Award Nominee for Specsavers Popular Fiction Book of the Year (2014)
My Opinion: Families, love and a beautiful setting.


As is always the case when I pick up a Santa Montefiore novel to read I was guaranteed to have a relaxing read. Families love and a beautiful setting, with a touch of the supernatural that took me away from the winter weather for a few hours. The author writes in a very atmospheric style and I soon became immersed in rural Ireland. In her now I feel signature style Santa has written, another enjoyable novel.
There is a strong spiritual leaning to the storyline as of the two main protagonists one is already dead. Ellie Trwaton is very much alive but at thirty three running away from a privileged lifestyle and an impending marriage that she has suddenly found claustrophobic.
Retreating to Ireland, to find herself amongst her Mother's Irish relations, she meets a mysterious widower and of course they suddenly finds themselves in love. Yes it is rather predictable, apart from the interesting device that there are chapters narrated by Connor's dead wife Caitlin. 

Recommended to fans of Rosamunde Pilcher, especially as she is often referred to as the author who took over her place in writing contemporary fiction. By coincidence Rosamunde Pilcher retired from writing in 2000 not long before Santa Montefiore's first novel was published. She has just published her 14th so plenty to read if you have not yet discovered her writing and are a fan of contemporary romantic fiction. The storyline may be seen as somewhat clichéd but to be honest this is what I think the author is aiming to achieve. She is writing for the mass market and her novels are not going to appeal to those of you looking for a great literary read. 

My Previous Reviews:

The Swallow and The Hummingbird    The French Gardener    The Summer House


Author Profile

Santa Montefiore was born Santa Palmer Tomkinson in 1970, either in January or February, the websites I used for research differ on this point! Growing up on farm in Hampshire and educated at Sherborne School for Girls, she went on to study Spanish and Italian at Exeter University. She later spent time in Argentina where her mother grew up, giving her inspiration for her early novels.  She now lives in London with her husband, writer and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and their two daughters.

She has fourteen published novels to date, the first one published in 2001 and the most recent was published on July 17th 2014.

• Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree(2001)
• The Butterfly Box (2002)
• The Forget-me-not Sonata (2003)
• The Swallow and the Hummingbird (2004)
• The Last Voyage of the Valentina (2005)
• The Gypsy Madonna (2006)
• Sea of Lost Love (2007)
• The French Gardener (2008)
• The Italian Matchmaker (2009)
• The Affair (2010)
•  The House By The Sea. (2011)
•  The Summer House (2012)
•  Secrets of the Lighthouse (2013)
•  The Beekeeper's Daughter (2014)

The biographical information and photo used in this post are with thanks to the following websites, where you can also find more information about the author and her writing.

Goodreads - Santa Montefiore    Santa Montefiore Official Website     Wikipedia - Santa Montefiore

Twitter - Santa Montefiore    Facebook - Santa Sebag-Montefiore   Amazon - Author Profile