This month, we\u2019re reading two novels that wrestle with troubling episodes of political history in Ireland and Venezuela.<\/p>\n
Land: A Novel<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\nMaggie O\u2019Farrell (Knopf, 400 pp., $32, June 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n <\/span>\n <\/a><\/div>\nMaggie O\u2019Farrell hardly needs an introduction after the extraordinary success of her 2020 novel, Hamnet<\/em>. But if that book is known for its specificity, its ability to imagine the minutiae of William Shakespeare\u2019s family life, her latest novel turns its focus outward, using one family to tell the tale of an entire nation. Land<\/em><\/a>, by far O\u2019Farrell\u2019s most ambitious work, is an epic of Ireland, one that spans continents and millennia, all while remaining deeply rooted in one plot of earth on an unnamed Irish peninsula.<\/p>\nThe core of the novel takes place after the Great Famine of the 1840s, which killed around 1 million Irish people and led more than 2 million more to emigrate. Tom\u00e1s, who survived those years, has been hired as a cartographer by the \u201credcoats\u201d to help complete Britain\u2019s Ordnance Survey of 1865. His role is \u201cto distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn.\u201d His young son is his apprentice, and after an alarming encounter at a well in an ancient wood, he moves his entire family from Dublin to a homestead in the remote valley, scarred from the famine, where the pair carried out their mapping.<\/p>\n
Yet Land <\/em>also seems to touch nearly all of Ireland\u2019s history and national lore: its colonization by the British, the mass exodus, the loss of Gaelic, Christianization, folk music, and its transformation into an agrarian society. (Only around 11 percent of Ireland remains forested, the third-lowest amount in the European Union.) At times, the novel reads almost like a medieval chronicle, as it moves across time, crop seasons, and invasions. In O\u2019Farrell\u2019s omniscient narration, we get the perspectives of not just family members and ancestors, but faraway figures and even objects: a skylark; a Roman general who chooses not to invade; and Tom\u00e1s\u2019s house itself, which can feel astonishment, even hold its breath. O\u2019Farrell herself recently described<\/a> a \u201cpagan animism\u201d running through the text.<\/p>\nPerhaps O\u2019Farrell\u2019s greatest feat with Land <\/em>is her attunement to both the intricacies of human lives and the broader sweep of nationhood. It is, after all, a deeply personal story to O\u2019Farrell, whose own great-great-grandfather was a cartographer for the Ordnance Survey. One can\u2019t help but admire, too, the artistry of her prose, even as the book occasionally tips into overexplaining its themes. (Early on, the mapmaker has an anticolonial revelation: \u201cI will do their bidding no more,\u201d he declares. \u201cI will never again cede to their version of geography, of history, of linguistics and toponomy.\u201d)<\/p>\nWhen Tom\u00e1s was a boy, nearly succumbing to hunger, he \u201cdiscovered, to his faint surprise, that there was within him an inexplicable but strong urge to survive. It gushed through his veins, lit up the branched tangles of his brain. \u2026 He would not be going under, it told him.\u201d What better figure to represent a nation of survival and resistance, of the unrelenting push for self-determination.\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\nThe Adventures of Juan Planchard: A Novel<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\nJonathan Jakubowicz (Grand Central Publishing, 288 pp., $29, June 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n
\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/02-Foreign-Policy-Magazine-Fiction-Books-June-2026.png?w=401\")
\n <\/span>\n <\/a><\/div>\nLike many books published in authoritarian contexts, The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em><\/a> is significant not only for its literary merit but also for its reception. Acclaimed filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz\u2014who has been based in Los Angeles for two decades and describes himself as \u201cthe first [Venezuelan] artist forced into exile\u201d\u2014published this raunchy thriller in Spanish 10 years ago. It climbed bestseller lists and earned the ire of Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, who banned it from bookstores across the country.<\/p>\nMaduro\u2019s censorship efforts were largely unsuccessful, and copies of The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> became a coveted form of contraband in Caracas. The novel \u201cstruck a nerve with a generation disillusioned by dictatorship and became a symbol of cultural resistance,\u201d Jakubowicz writes in an author\u2019s note accompanying a new English translation out this month.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nThe Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> is set in 2011, in the waning days of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s rule. 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 details Juan\u2019s escapades in such vulgar, almost pornographic prose that it cannot be quoted in this magazine. One chapter is simply titled \u201cGADDAFI\u2019S ASS.\u201d (\u201cI knew that if I packed in enough sex and violence, [the book] might just go viral,\u201d Jakubowicz writes.)<\/p>\nJuan is a pragmatic Bolivarian revolutionary. Raised by middle-class parents who back Venezuela\u2019s opposition\u2014and resent their son\u2019s ties to Ch\u00e1vez\u2014he ditched a stable corporate career to get rich off state corruption. (\u201cIf the game is rigged for hustlers, then hustle,\u201d Juan says of survival in his \u201cpoor, rich country.\u201d) Privately, he is critical of Venezuela\u2019s insecurity and lack of due process. But he also understands socialism\u2019s appeal, particularly to the poor, and\u2014despite owning property in several U.S. cities\u2014takes every opportunity to critique \u201cthe Empire.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2011, Juan hits several personal and professional roadblocks. Ch\u00e1vez is diagnosed with cancer, and some in Caracas\u2019 elite are \u201cafraid the party was ending.\u201d The year \u201cfelt like one defeat after another\u201d for global socialism, Juan says, adding, \u201cIn the span of a few months, we\u2019d lost not only Gaddafi, but El Mono Jojoy, Osama bin Laden, and Kim Jong-il.\u201d Juan also falls in love with Scarlet, a 21-year-old student at the University of California, Los Angeles, who challenges his swindler lifestyle. And, most importantly to the book\u2019s plot, his parents become victims of the Chavista state apparatus, making Juan a \u201crevolutionary devoured by the very chaos he once sanctified.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> is a work of fiction, Jakubowicz appears to skewer several real-life figures. In addition to Ch\u00e1vez, Juan deals with a character named Vera G\u00f3ldiger\u2014an American woman who works for Ch\u00e1vez and is almost certainly a reference to Eva Golinger<\/a>. Juan and Scarlet party on a yacht belonging to a \u201cFire-Breathing Deputy,\u201d who may be Delcy Rodr\u00edguez<\/a> or another woman high up in the Chavista ranks.<\/p>\nThe book feels oddly prescient in other ways, too. In pondering what Cuba might look like if its benefactor Ch\u00e1vez were to fall, Juan says: \u201cThe Castros survived without the Soviets, and they\u2019ll survive without us, even if it means watching their entire island starve to death.\u201d Jakubowicz could not have known that the English translation of his novel would be published months after the U.S. ouster of Maduro and amid a hunger crisis<\/a> in Cuba fueled by an intensified U.S. blockade<\/a> of the island.<\/p>\nAs much as The Adventures of Juan Planchard <\/em>deals with Venezuela, it is equally about the United States. In one crasser passage, Juan says: \u201cMiami\u2019s the promised land for Latin American elites, but to actual Americans, Florida is full of fat, uneducated rednecks.\u201d Juan has a love-hate relationship with the United States that ultimately morphs into exasperated resignation about U.S. hegemony. \u201cThe gringos, man! Whatever you do, they always end up with your money, your oil, your banks, your friends, your country, your dreams\u2026 your life,\u201d Juan says at the story\u2019s end.\u2014Allison Meakem<\/em><\/p>\nJune Releases, In Brief<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\nAmitav Ghosh returns to speculative fiction with Ghost-Eye<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a climate novel set across 1960s Calcutta and modern-day New York. In Claire Fuller\u2019s Hunger and Thirst<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a documentarian unearths a London sculptor\u2019s (literally) haunted past. C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s Five<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Chris Andrews, brings a quintet of the Argentine writer\u2019s novellas to the English market. Keith Ridgway reimagines his hometown of Dublin in the dreamlike Dooneen<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. In Andrew Sean Greer\u2019s Villa Coco<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a young Brit finds himself swept up into the world of a Tuscan baroness.<\/p>\nAn American has-been finds himself at the heart of a Bollywood murder mystery in crime mastermind Abir Mukherjee\u2019s The Pinnacle<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Chantel Acevedo\u2019s Cages<\/em><\/strong><\/a> pieces together the fraught story of one man\u2019s life across Havana, London, and Miami. A pair of buzzy novels by \u00c9douard Louis\u2014Collapse<\/em><\/strong><\/a> and Monique Escapes<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u2014are translated from French by Tash Aw and John Lambert, respectively. Tragedy, psychoanalysis, and the sweep of 20th-century history converge in Monica Datta\u2019s Nebraska<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. And Isabel J. Kim\u2019s debut novel Sublimation<\/em><\/strong><\/a> asks: What if international borders cut migrants into two?\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n
\n <\/span>
Maggie O\u2019Farrell hardly needs an introduction after the extraordinary success of her 2020 novel, Hamnet<\/em>. But if that book is known for its specificity, its ability to imagine the minutiae of William Shakespeare\u2019s family life, her latest novel turns its focus outward, using one family to tell the tale of an entire nation. Land<\/em><\/a>, by far O\u2019Farrell\u2019s most ambitious work, is an epic of Ireland, one that spans continents and millennia, all while remaining deeply rooted in one plot of earth on an unnamed Irish peninsula.<\/p>\n The core of the novel takes place after the Great Famine of the 1840s, which killed around 1 million Irish people and led more than 2 million more to emigrate. Tom\u00e1s, who survived those years, has been hired as a cartographer by the \u201credcoats\u201d to help complete Britain\u2019s Ordnance Survey of 1865. His role is \u201cto distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn.\u201d His young son is his apprentice, and after an alarming encounter at a well in an ancient wood, he moves his entire family from Dublin to a homestead in the remote valley, scarred from the famine, where the pair carried out their mapping.<\/p>\n Yet Land <\/em>also seems to touch nearly all of Ireland\u2019s history and national lore: its colonization by the British, the mass exodus, the loss of Gaelic, Christianization, folk music, and its transformation into an agrarian society. (Only around 11 percent of Ireland remains forested, the third-lowest amount in the European Union.) At times, the novel reads almost like a medieval chronicle, as it moves across time, crop seasons, and invasions. In O\u2019Farrell\u2019s omniscient narration, we get the perspectives of not just family members and ancestors, but faraway figures and even objects: a skylark; a Roman general who chooses not to invade; and Tom\u00e1s\u2019s house itself, which can feel astonishment, even hold its breath. O\u2019Farrell herself recently described<\/a> a \u201cpagan animism\u201d running through the text.<\/p>\n Perhaps O\u2019Farrell\u2019s greatest feat with Land <\/em>is her attunement to both the intricacies of human lives and the broader sweep of nationhood. It is, after all, a deeply personal story to O\u2019Farrell, whose own great-great-grandfather was a cartographer for the Ordnance Survey. One can\u2019t help but admire, too, the artistry of her prose, even as the book occasionally tips into overexplaining its themes. (Early on, the mapmaker has an anticolonial revelation: \u201cI will do their bidding no more,\u201d he declares. \u201cI will never again cede to their version of geography, of history, of linguistics and toponomy.\u201d)<\/p>\n When Tom\u00e1s was a boy, nearly succumbing to hunger, he \u201cdiscovered, to his faint surprise, that there was within him an inexplicable but strong urge to survive. It gushed through his veins, lit up the branched tangles of his brain. \u2026 He would not be going under, it told him.\u201d What better figure to represent a nation of survival and resistance, of the unrelenting push for self-determination.\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\n Jonathan Jakubowicz (Grand Central Publishing, 288 pp., $29, June 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n Like many books published in authoritarian contexts, The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em><\/a> is significant not only for its literary merit but also for its reception. Acclaimed filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz\u2014who has been based in Los Angeles for two decades and describes himself as \u201cthe first [Venezuelan] artist forced into exile\u201d\u2014published this raunchy thriller in Spanish 10 years ago. It climbed bestseller lists and earned the ire of Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, who banned it from bookstores across the country.<\/p>\n Maduro\u2019s censorship efforts were largely unsuccessful, and copies of The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> became a coveted form of contraband in Caracas. The novel \u201cstruck a nerve with a generation disillusioned by dictatorship and became a symbol of cultural resistance,\u201d Jakubowicz writes in an author\u2019s note accompanying a new English translation out this month.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> is set in 2011, in the waning days of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s rule. 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 details Juan\u2019s escapades in such vulgar, almost pornographic prose that it cannot be quoted in this magazine. One chapter is simply titled \u201cGADDAFI\u2019S ASS.\u201d (\u201cI knew that if I packed in enough sex and violence, [the book] might just go viral,\u201d Jakubowicz writes.)<\/p>\n Juan is a pragmatic Bolivarian revolutionary. Raised by middle-class parents who back Venezuela\u2019s opposition\u2014and resent their son\u2019s ties to Ch\u00e1vez\u2014he ditched a stable corporate career to get rich off state corruption. (\u201cIf the game is rigged for hustlers, then hustle,\u201d Juan says of survival in his \u201cpoor, rich country.\u201d) Privately, he is critical of Venezuela\u2019s insecurity and lack of due process. But he also understands socialism\u2019s appeal, particularly to the poor, and\u2014despite owning property in several U.S. cities\u2014takes every opportunity to critique \u201cthe Empire.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2011, Juan hits several personal and professional roadblocks. Ch\u00e1vez is diagnosed with cancer, and some in Caracas\u2019 elite are \u201cafraid the party was ending.\u201d The year \u201cfelt like one defeat after another\u201d for global socialism, Juan says, adding, \u201cIn the span of a few months, we\u2019d lost not only Gaddafi, but El Mono Jojoy, Osama bin Laden, and Kim Jong-il.\u201d Juan also falls in love with Scarlet, a 21-year-old student at the University of California, Los Angeles, who challenges his swindler lifestyle. And, most importantly to the book\u2019s plot, his parents become victims of the Chavista state apparatus, making Juan a \u201crevolutionary devoured by the very chaos he once sanctified.\u201d<\/p>\n Although The Adventures of Juan Planchard<\/em> is a work of fiction, Jakubowicz appears to skewer several real-life figures. In addition to Ch\u00e1vez, Juan deals with a character named Vera G\u00f3ldiger\u2014an American woman who works for Ch\u00e1vez and is almost certainly a reference to Eva Golinger<\/a>. Juan and Scarlet party on a yacht belonging to a \u201cFire-Breathing Deputy,\u201d who may be Delcy Rodr\u00edguez<\/a> or another woman high up in the Chavista ranks.<\/p>\n The book feels oddly prescient in other ways, too. In pondering what Cuba might look like if its benefactor Ch\u00e1vez were to fall, Juan says: \u201cThe Castros survived without the Soviets, and they\u2019ll survive without us, even if it means watching their entire island starve to death.\u201d Jakubowicz could not have known that the English translation of his novel would be published months after the U.S. ouster of Maduro and amid a hunger crisis<\/a> in Cuba fueled by an intensified U.S. blockade<\/a> of the island.<\/p>\n As much as The Adventures of Juan Planchard <\/em>deals with Venezuela, it is equally about the United States. In one crasser passage, Juan says: \u201cMiami\u2019s the promised land for Latin American elites, but to actual Americans, Florida is full of fat, uneducated rednecks.\u201d Juan has a love-hate relationship with the United States that ultimately morphs into exasperated resignation about U.S. hegemony. \u201cThe gringos, man! Whatever you do, they always end up with your money, your oil, your banks, your friends, your country, your dreams\u2026 your life,\u201d Juan says at the story\u2019s end.\u2014Allison Meakem<\/em><\/p>\n Amitav Ghosh returns to speculative fiction with Ghost-Eye<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a climate novel set across 1960s Calcutta and modern-day New York. In Claire Fuller\u2019s Hunger and Thirst<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a documentarian unearths a London sculptor\u2019s (literally) haunted past. C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s Five<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Chris Andrews, brings a quintet of the Argentine writer\u2019s novellas to the English market. Keith Ridgway reimagines his hometown of Dublin in the dreamlike Dooneen<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. In Andrew Sean Greer\u2019s Villa Coco<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a young Brit finds himself swept up into the world of a Tuscan baroness.<\/p>\n An American has-been finds himself at the heart of a Bollywood murder mystery in crime mastermind Abir Mukherjee\u2019s The Pinnacle<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Chantel Acevedo\u2019s Cages<\/em><\/strong><\/a> pieces together the fraught story of one man\u2019s life across Havana, London, and Miami. A pair of buzzy novels by \u00c9douard Louis\u2014Collapse<\/em><\/strong><\/a> and Monique Escapes<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u2014are translated from French by Tash Aw and John Lambert, respectively. Tragedy, psychoanalysis, and the sweep of 20th-century history converge in Monica Datta\u2019s Nebraska<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. And Isabel J. Kim\u2019s debut novel Sublimation<\/em><\/strong><\/a> asks: What if international borders cut migrants into two?\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nThe Adventures of Juan Planchard: A Novel<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\n <\/span>June Releases, In Brief<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n