This week we're discussing Maggie O'Farrell's Land. Spoiler warning – we delve into the novel in detail, so save this episode until you've finished reading if you'd rather avoid spoilers!

Before we get stuck in, Hannah shares the highlight of her holiday in Cornwall, where she was lucky enough to spot a basking shark off Lizard Point, while Nikki recounts another of her epic Canterbury Tales pilgrim walks – a 14-mile trek on one of the hottest days of the year – before heading off to see The Odyssey this weekend.

In this episode we discuss:

• Our first impressions of Land and why it felt like a departure from Maggie O'Farrell's previous novels.

• Why Hannah considers it a modern masterpiece, despite finding it slow to get into and why Nikki struggled to connect emotionally with the story.

• The emotional impact of the novel, family sagas versus single-character narratives and how different readers experience the same book in completely different ways.

• The history of the 19th-century Ordnance Survey of Ireland, its significance within the novel and the connections to Maggie O'Farrell's own family history.

• Themes of land, ownership, power, suppression, violence and whether we ever truly own the places we inhabit.

• Why we think the book's blurb doesn't quite capture what the novel is really about.

• Literary comparisons with Brian Friel's Translations and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

• Magical realism, folklore, mythology, symbolism and the rich recurring motifs woven throughout the novel.

• Migration, belonging, loss, legacy, reclamation and what it really means to call somewhere home.

• O'Farrell's portrayal of a neurodivergent character and whether we felt it rang true.

• How our own life experiences shape the way we read and respond to literature.

• The novel's dense, lyrical prose, its minimal dialogue, pacing and whether slower books reward patient readers.

We'll also reveal our next Buddy Read: The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce.

Next episode, we'll be catching up on everything we've been reading recently and sharing the books currently sitting on our ever-growing TBR piles.