Maggie O’Farrell on her favourite Irish reads and the book that inspired her to write

Maggie O'Farrell shared her top book recommendations with Her Book Club

Last week, we had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Maggie to discuss her new release, Land.

Selling a whopping 3,300 copies in its first week and heading straight to number 1 on the Irish charts, Land is one of the biggest-selling books of the year in the country.

Maggie O'Farrell's work is full of beautiful prose, with settings so vivid and well-described that they completely transport you to a different time period.

Land has been one of our favourite reads of the year, and is one that you can't miss out on.

The Hamnet author shared some of her favourite books with us, and if Maggie recommends it, we're definitely adding it to our reading lists.

What was your favourite read of 2025?

"I really loved a debut novel called Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell. It's a novel about a young boy in the 1980s in rural Ireland, and he's trying to get used to a new shape for his family. It reminds me a little bit of Donal Ryan and Claire Keegan.

Maggie added, "It's a really wonderful book."

What is an Irish novel that you love?

"It's really hard to narrow it down to one, but I think it would have to be A Pagan Place by Edna O'Brien. It's my very favourite O'Brien, which, you know, there are many strong contenders in that category.

"When I was about 13 or 14, and I was just starting to read adult books, my mum said to me, 'You can read anything on the shelf, but don't read those'. So obviously, the next time she went out, I did go and read them."

"And one of them was A Pagan Place, which is, on one level, a kind of coming-of-age book of a young girl living in rural Ireland, but on the other, it's an incredibly experimental novel. It's all told in the second person, so as in 'you walked', 'you think'. 

"It's such early evidence of O'Brien's daring. It's a really fantastic, beautiful novel."

What is a book that changed your life?

"I mean, there are so many books that have changed my life and reconfigured my brain.

"I think one of the ones that I was very struck by when I was probably in my mid-20s, and it was The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

"It's a very astonishing, quite shocking retelling of Grimm's fairy tales. And it was a book that really made me want to seriously try to write. I remember reading it really late when I was living in Hong Kong at the time. I remember putting it down and thinking, I really have to try to do this.

 "So I think in that way, it kind of inspired me to be quite serious about efforts in writing."

Land by Maggie O'Farrell

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?

You can buy Land here.