This curation of The Conversation UK’s arts and culture coverage was first published in our fortnightly newsletter, Something Good.

Maggie O’Farrell is responsible for some of my biggest COVID cries (impressive, considering how hotly contested that category is). Hamnet hit home with its uncanny parallels to pandemic life with shuttered playhouses, quarantines and families separated by illness. The film adaptation, released last year to great acclaim, presented me with another emotional outpouring. This time at the powerhouse performance from Jessie Buckley, whose grieving maternal howls made me flinch – but never look away.

O’Farrell’s new novel looks set to leave an equally devastating impression. Land follows mapmaker Tomás and his eldest son Liam, charting the land in the aftermath of the great famine in 1860s Ireland. It’s a family saga spanning centuries and continents, inspired by O’Farrell’s real great-great-grandfather, who worked for Ordnance Survey.

Our reviewer described the novel as “exquisite” and “haunting”. An expert in the famine, he was impressed by the way O’Farrell charted a land that was “changed utterly. A whole way of life was eroded, and Land imagines what it must have been like to walk among the ruins, to see an agrarian culture collapse, and, for those left behind, to forge a future from remnants”.

Land........

© The Conversation