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The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger.

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?

Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

ABOUT THE Author

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

REVIEWS

“A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds, and skies.” —Daniel Mason, author of North Woods

“This deep, dense, heartrending novel is the best of Maggie O’Farrell, who is the best of writers, modern and alive, with the detailed brilliance of great nineteenth-century storytellers. All I need as a reader is in Land.” —Amy Bloom, author of In Love

“Expansive and intimate, this beautiful book swallowed me whole. I loved it and will miss its characters terribly.” —Charlotte McConaghy, author of Wild Dark Shore

“A stunning and gorgeous epic. . . . O’Farrell paints a devasting yet tender portrait of Irish history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Evocative and impassioned. . . . Steeped in Irish history and folklore, alive with a sense of wonder.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“A transfixing epic . . . [Land] adds to O’Farrell’s reputation as a superb literary stylist. . . . This wonderfully expansive yet intimate saga, which illustrates how individuals survive the devastating legacies of imperialism and religious control, offers a sense of empathetic harmony between author and subject.” —Booklist (starred review)

“O’Farrell’s latest is highly recommended for all fiction collections. This lyrical and moving historical novel about Ireland and one family within its larger history will enchant her fans and anyone who likes family sagas.” —Library Journal (starred review)