Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“We are rootless …we are landless. And worse than that, we are at the beck and call of the enemy.”

Land: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Cbr18bingo Map I am a great admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s novels, but she is the literary personification of “You guys wanna see a dead body?”. O’Farrell does not hesitate to get into the ugly, nitty gritty of life: complex family dynamics, betrayal, grief, sorrow, and violence. She also is comfortable in a variety of time periods: Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 20th century England, and in Land, 19th century Ireland. Yes, this time O’Farrell brings the reader to the Great Famine and its aftermath. That piece […]

This Land Was Made For You and Me

Land by Maggie O'Farrell

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The beginning of Maggie O’Farrell’s Land finds ten-year-old Liam out in the woods in an unnamed, remote Irish peninsula with his father, Tomás. It is not long after the Great Famine decimated the population. At the behest of the British army, they are surveying the area to make accurate maps, interviewing the remaining locals to ascertain the names of hills, lakes, and other geographic formations, all of which Tomás has to render into English from their original Irish. When Liam gets lost in the woods and […]

Generational trauma, made worse through institutional systems

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

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Bingo Square: Map (the father is a map maker) This book made me cry twice, I loved the way it tied back to history, and also how it explored the Great Hunger, showing the impact on families and the land. It also showed hints of the many complex themes throughout Irish history, some in conflict and some in conversation with each other, from the role of the old ways and the Catholic Church, class issues, colonization and the relationship with the English. There’s this large focus […]

‘What else is there to say? That I loved him more than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone.’

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

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One thing I kept thinking about while reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell were the words of a colleague, “The truth will out.” He had said this more than a decade ago when we were discussing certain politicians involved with atrocities and corruption. His belief was that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, or in what form, but no matter what, the truth will come out. It’s something I come back to these days as we flail in this purgatory of misinformation. What […]

I seem to read a lot of novels about grief

After You’d Gone: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell has a knack for writing about grief. All of the novels of hers that I have read have dealt with strong-willed, unusual women, their love lives, and their grief and sorrow (Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox). After You’d Gone is O’Farrell’s first novel and while perhaps not as polished or finished as her later works, it still kept me glued to the text and broke my heart. It is the story of 29-year-old Alice Raikes who, when the […]

Difficult Women

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite contemporary writers. She has a great talent for historical fiction (read Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait), and she excels at telling stories of women who find themselves in untenable positions. In The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Esme is a woman who, like Agnes in Hamnet and Lucrezia in The Marriage Portrait, is unusual in ways that make her seem dangerous to those around her. She does not conform to conventional traditional female roles and, as we know […]



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