This beautiful, big, tragic story about Ireland moves through time and place and people, transforming lives in a way that only land can do. It begins in 1865 with Tomas and his young son Liam surveying the Northwest Irish peninsula, but it soon shifts back 10 years to the Great Hunger and to Tomas’s childhood, an orphan in a workhouse and to the horrific deaths he cannot stop seeing. 

He becomes a cartographer, a mapper of the land, and he wants his maps to convey the history, the markers of the past–the workhouses, the weed fields, the mass graves, the way the land could not support its people, the names and places that disappeared. But as an employee of the occupying British, he’s tasked with mapping the present and ignoring the past–a task that torments him and affects his role as father, husband, and cartographer. 

And often the story shifts forward to Liam’s life as a priest in Rome and then India and to his sister Enda’s life in Quebec City. And then back to the present, to the hill they live on: Tomas and Phina and their four young children–Liam, Enda, Rose, and Eugene working the land and succeeding in the post hunger years. 

So many powerful characters and scenes bring this story to life: the widow down the hill who nurtures this family, a loyal dog that feels as human as the kids, a headstrong sister who wants the job of her brother and also to play her fiddle, a devoted brother who will throw off a cliff those who harm his sister, a magic pool of water with an ancient talking fish, a power hungry priest who will wreck a life to get ahead. 

I love the way we come to know all of these people with their triumphs and flaws and the way they’re shaped by the land they come from and the lands they travel to. There’s a great deal of tragedy in these 400 pages but also love and grit and devotion. Excellent writing. 5⭐️