This month, we’re reading two novels that tackle troubling periods of political history in Ireland and Venezuela.
Land: A Novel
Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 400 pp., $32, June 2026)
Maggie O’Farrell needs no introduction after the incredible success of her 2020 novel, Hamnet. But if the book is known for its specificity, its ability to imagine the minutiae of William Shakespeare’s family life, his latest novel turns its focus outward, using one family to tell the story of an entire nation. LandO’Farrell’s magnum opus is an Irish thesis, spanning continents and millennia, all rooted in a single landmass on the unnamed Irish peninsula.
The basis of the novel takes place after the Great Famine of the 1840s, which killed nearly 1 million Irish people and caused over 2 million to emigrate. Tomás, who survived those years, is employed as a cartographer by the “redcoats” to help complete the British Ordnance Survey of 1865. His role is to “mark in ink and order the lines that have occurred here since the first maps were drawn.” His young son is his apprentice, and after a terrifying encounter at a well in an ancient tree, he moves his entire family from Dublin to a farm in a remote valley, scarred from starvation, where the pair do mapping.
Not yet Land it also seems to touch on almost all of Ireland’s history and national story: its colonization by the British, the mass exodus, the loss of Gaelic, Christianity, traditional music, and its transformation into an agricultural society. (Only about 11 percent of Ireland remains forested, the third lowest amount in the European Union.) At times, the novel reads like medieval history, as it moves between time, cropping seasons, and invasions. In O’Farrell’s omniscient descriptions, we find perspectives not only of family members and ancestors, but distant figures and even objects: the skylark; a Roman general who chooses not to invade; and Tomás’ house itself, which can feel awe, even holding its breath. O’Farrell himself recently explained “pagan animation” running through the text.
Perhaps O’Farrell’s greatest work Land it is his solidarity with the hardships of human life and the broad sweep of nationalism. It is, after all, a personal story for O’Farrell, whose great-great-grandfather was a cartographer for the Ordnance Survey. One cannot help but admire, too, the craftsmanship of his prose, even as the book occasionally hints at over-explaining its themes. (In the beginning, the mapmaker has an anti-colonial revelation: “I will no longer do their work,” he declares. “I will no longer abandon their version of geography, history, linguistics and toponomy.”)
When Tomás was a boy, about to succumb to hunger, he “discovered, with faint astonishment, that there was within him an indescribable but powerful desire to live. It flowed through his veins, illumined the branching folds of his brain. … What better person represents a nation of survival and resistance, of an unceasing impulse to self-determination.—Jn.Chloe Hadavas
The Adventures of Juan Planchard: A Novel
Jonathan Jakubowicz (Grand Central Publishing, 288 pp., $29, June 2026)
Like many books published in authoritarian contexts, Adventures of Juan Planchard it is important not only for its literary quality but also for its reception. Acclaimed filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz—who has lived in Los Angeles for two decades and describes himself as “the first (Venezuelan) artist forced into exile”—published this stirring thriller in Spanish 10 years ago. It climbed the bestseller lists and angered Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who banned it from bookstores across the country.
Maduro’s censorship efforts have largely failed, and copies of Adventures of Juan Planchard became a coveted form of smuggling in Caracas. The novel “appealed to a generation disillusioned with the dictatorship and became a symbol of cultural resistance,” Jakubowicz writes in an author’s letter accompanying a new English translation this month.
Adventures of Juan Planchard was founded in 2011, in the waning days of Hugo Chávez’s administration. Pro-government tycoon Juan Planchard jets between Caracas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Madrid, Miami, and New York, spending most of his time snorting cocaine, sleeping with prostitutes, and making shady deals with Chinese businessmen. Jakubowicz describes Juan’s escape in vulgar, almost pornographic terms that cannot be quoted in this magazine. One chapter is titled “GADDAFI’S DONKEY.” (“I knew that if I filled it with enough sex and violence, (the book) could be distributed to many people,” Jakubowicz writes.)
Juan is a Bolivian scientific revolutionary. Raised by middle-class parents who support the Venezuelan opposition—and hate their son’s ties to Chávez—he quit his corporate job to get rich from government corruption. (“If the game is stolen for the players, then chaos,” Juan says of survival in his “poor and rich country.”) Privately, he criticizes Venezuela’s lack of security and lack of proper regulation. But he also understands the appeal of socialism, especially to the poor, and—despite owning property in several American cities—takes every opportunity to criticize “the Empire.”
In 2011, Juan hit several personal and professional obstacles. Chávez has been diagnosed with cancer, and some Caracas celebrities “fear the party was over.” The year “felt like one failure after another” for international socialism, Juan says, adding, “In a few months, we lost not only Gaddafi, but El Mono Jojoy, Osama bin Laden, and Kim Jong-il.” Juan is also in love with Scarlet, a 21-year-old student at the University of California, Los Angeles, who opposes his life of fraud. And, most important to the plot of the book, his parents fall victim to the apparatus of the Chavista government, making Juan “a revolutionary consumed by the chaos he once purified.”
Although Adventures of Juan Planchard is a work of fiction, Jakubowicz appears to misrepresent several real-life figures. In addition to Chávez, Juan deals with a character named Vera Góldiger—an American woman who works for Chávez and actually refers to him. Eva Gollinger. Juan and Scarlet party on a boat belonging to the “Fire Breathing Deputy,” who may be Delcy Rodriguez or another woman high up in the ranks of Chavista.
This book feels amazing in other ways too. Reflecting on what Cuba might look like if its benefactor Chávez were to fall, Juan says: “The Castros survived without the Soviets, and they will survive without us, even if it means watching their entire island starve.” Jakubowicz could not have known that the English translation of his novel would be published several months after the United States was removed from Maduro and in the middle of hunger crisis in Cuba prompted by increased US sanctions of the island.
Like that Adventures of Juan Planchard it deals with Venezuela, it is the same with the United States. In one small passage, Juan says: “Miami is the promised land for Latin American intellectuals, but for real Americans, Florida is full of uneducated rednecks.” Juan has a love-hate relationship with America that eventually turns into angry resignation about American rule. “Clever, man! Whatever you do, you always end up with your money, your oil, your banks, your friends, your country, your dreams… your life,” Juan says at the end of the story.Allison Meakem
Released in June, Briefly
Amitav Ghosh returns to speculative fiction with Ghost-Eyea climatic novel set in 1960s Calcutta and contemporary New York. At Claire Fuller’s Hunger and Thirstdocumentarian discovers London’s (literally) sculptor’s troubled past. César Aira’s name Fivetranslated by Chris Andrews, brings a quintet of novels by the Argentine author to the English market. Keith Ridgway reimagines his hometown of Dublin in such a dream A boat. In Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa CocoA young Brit finds himself thrust into the world of a Tuscan aristocrat.
An American has found himself in the middle of a Bollywood murder mystery in the group of crime lord Abir Mukherjee. Tower High. Chantel Acevedo Cages pieces together an exciting story of one man’s life across Havana, London, and Miami. A pair of thriller novels by Édouard Louis—Fold and Monique Escapes—translated from the French by Tash Aw and John Lambert, respectively. Tragedy, psychoanalysis, and the sweep of 20th century history come together in Monica Datta’s book. Nebraska. And Isabel J. Kim’s first novel Sublimation asks: What if international borders cut off two migrants?—Chloe Hadavas
