Excellent.

Land is a 2026 historical novel written by Maggie O’Farrell.

Literature more than just another best seller psychological drama. Some magic realism.

Set primarily in 1865 Ireland, a decade after the absolute devastation of the Great Hunger (Irish Potato Famine), the narrative follows an Irish cartographer named Tomás and his reluctant ten-year-old son, Liam. They are commissioned by the British Ordnance Survey to map a windswept peninsula jutting into the Atlantic.

While mapping, Tomás has a profound, mystical encounter at a pre-Christian holy spring. This experience causes him to abandon his official colonial duties to secretly draw a “dissident map”—one that preserves the true, untampered memory and history of the Irish landscape.

When Tomás is mentally destabilized by this event, young Liam is left terrified and forced to figure out how to complete the mapping and find a way back home.

That’s just the start.

The timeline spans generations and branches out from rural Ireland to Dublin, Rome, Quebec, and Kolkata, capturing the sweeping scale of the Irish emigration experience.

Critics praised Land for its sheer ambition, lyrical depth, and masterful prose, while also noting its complex, fractured structure and heavy thematic focus on colonial hardship.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Entertaining.

The story follows Bennie Rosato, a fierce Philadelphia criminal defense attorney who specializes in police misconduct cases.

Her life is upended when she goes to a maximum-security prison to meet a new client, Alice Connolly. Alice is accused of the brutal, cold-blooded murder of her lover, who was a highly decorated police detective. 

When Bennie arrives, she is stunned to see a woman who looks exactly like her. Alice claims she was framed by the police and introduces herself as Bennie’s long-lost identical twin sister. Because Bennie grew up believing she was an only child, she is deeply skeptical. However, Alice knows intimate details about Bennie’s family that are impossible to ignore. 

With the trial starting in only one week, Bennie reluctantly takes the case. She plunges into a high-stakes legal battle, unearthing police corruption, dark family secrets, and a dangerous cover-up.

Interesting, too, is a subplot in the world of boxing. Drugs. Fixing fights. Laundering money.

The last chapter is a surprising twist.

Not bad. Some original to me ideas.

The Sleepwalker is a 2017 psychological thriller novel by Chris Bohjalian.

The story explores the mysterious world of parasomnia, blending a missing-person investigation with deep family secrets.

Annalee Ahlberg is a wife and mother who suffers from severe, sometimes dangerous sleepwalking episodes. One night, while her husband is away on a business trip, Annalee disappears from her bed

When a torn piece of her nightshirt is discovered hanging from a tree branch near a dangerous local river, the police and her family fear she may have drowned during an episode.

Her eldest daughter, Lianna, leaves college to care for her broken family.

As the investigation continues, Lianna becomes romantically drawn to Gavin Rikert, the lead detective on the case. However, she quickly begins to realize that Gavin knows far more about her mother’s private life than a detective should, sparking a web of suspicion, lies, and buried desires.

Paige is Lianna’s 12-year-old younger sister. She is described as a highly athletic and gifted ski racer who struggles deeply with her mother’s sudden disappearance, even taking to swimming the local river to search for clues herself.

Mary Kubica’s 2026 psychological thriller — It’s Not Her — is excellent.

Plenty of twists & turns. Try to guess the killer.

The Crime: Courtney Gray’s peaceful vacation turns into a nightmare when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law brutally murdered in their lakeside cottage. 

The Disappearance: Her teenage niece, Reese, is completely missing from the scene, while her young nephew, Wyatt, is found sleeping upstairs entirely unharmed. 

The Investigation: As local police swarm the remote resort town, dark family secrets and local town history surface.

John Scalzi is an entertaining writer. Past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. 

He is best known for his Old Man’s War series.

This book is not nearly as engaging for me as Old Man.

The Collapsing Empire is a 2017 space opera novel, the opening book of The Interdependency trilogy, a sci-fi series focused on political intrigue, economic monopolies, and a looming climate-like cosmic crisis.

Travel between distant star systems is exclusively possible via “The Flow,” a naturally occurring extra-dimensional field that acts like an interstellar highway.

Unfortunately, The Flow is shifting away from its current entry and exit points (called “Shoals”) near the planets of the Interdependency. Each will become isolated.

Interesting main characters:

• Cardenia Wu-Patrick: The newly crowned Emperox (empress) of the Interdependency who is thrust into power following her father’s death and her brother’s racing accident.
• Marce Larson: A dedicated scientist who travels across space to bring definitive, terrifying data about the collapse of the Flow directly to the Emperox.
• Kiva Lagos: A fiercely independent, profane, and fiercely sharp starship captain and scion of a major Merchant House who stumbles onto a dangerous political conspiracy