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Land
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Overview
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 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."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 On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tom s 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. Tom s, 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 Tom s 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 Tom s, 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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780593320648
- ISBN-10: 0593320646
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Publish Date: June 2026
- Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
- Page Count: 400
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- 1
“To map is to assume power,” writes Maggie O’Farrell in her majestic novel Land. Tomás, a taciturn Irish surveyor and draughtsman, is working for the British Ordnance Survey to map the rocky outcrops, forested drumlins and field boundaries of his homeland. After surviving the Great Famine, he is dedicated to a quiet rebellion: ensuring the famine’s geographical manifestations—the abandoned farmlands, the ruined estates—are recorded on maps. The novel opens in 1865 as he surveys a western peninsula with his young son and apprentice, Liam. Back home in Dublin, the rest of the family awaits his return and meager wages. His wife, Phina, whom he met in a workhouse after their families starved to death, is pregnant with their fourth child.
On the peninsula, Tomás discovers a copse tucked into a hillock, and within it, a deep, still pool of water. He disappears there for days. When he is found, Tomás is raving, garrulous and filled with ideas. “This is a country that has attracted wave upon wave of conquerors, those who seek to occupy and enslave,” he reflects. He realizes that he must burn his maps and envision Ireland anew with a “true cartographic representation of his country, which would have erased and disregarded its conquerors.” At its center will be the pool, a sacred source from which all other life springs. Obsessed by this notion, Tomás frightens Liam and the villagers, one of whom calls in a hateful Jesuit priest to perform an exorcism. Though traumatized by the experience, Tomás moves his family to the peninsula, to the source.
O’Farrell casts her net back millennia to tell the story of the land, its ancient people and the ethereal—even supernatural—power of the pool. As in Hamnet, O’Farrell skillfully oscillates among the points of view of her characters, sometimes taking wing as a skylark or nosing around as the loyal family dog in order to reveal an aspect of the story the human characters cannot perceive. As ever, O’Farrell’s prose is a gift: Her language is lush and muscular, particularly in descriptions of landscape and foliage.
For Tomás and his kin, the years that follow their move to the peninsula are full of misfortune. Some readers may feel that the parade of tragedies that befall the family beggars belief. But because O’Farrell takes such care in her flashbacks to Tomás’ childhood during the Great Famine, we know that the setbacks and betrayals in this saga are consequences of that disaster. The famine may have spared Tomás and Phina, but it reverberates in the lives of their children. Yet nature endures: The peninsula, the copse and its pool survive the waves of conquerors. “You will never understand how the land remembers,” Tomás tells the priest just before the exorcism. Land is a story of great losses—and greater power.
“To map is to assume power,” writes Maggie O’Farrell in her majestic novel Land. Tomás, a taciturn Irish surveyor and draughtsman, is working for the British Ordnance Survey to map the rocky outcrops, forested drumlins and field boundaries of his homeland. After surviving the Great Famine, he is dedicated to a quiet rebellion: ensuring the famine’s geographical manifestations—the abandoned farmlands, the ruined estates—are recorded on maps. The novel opens in 1865 as he surveys a western peninsula with his young son and apprentice, Liam. Back home in Dublin, the rest of the family awaits his return and meager wages. His wife, Phina, whom he met in a workhouse after their families starved to death, is pregnant with their fourth child.
On the peninsula, Tomás discovers a copse tucked into a hillock, and within it, a deep, still pool of water. He disappears there for days. When he is found, Tomás is raving, garrulous and filled with ideas. “This is a country that has attracted wave upon wave of conquerors, those who seek to occupy and enslave,” he reflects. He realizes that he must burn his maps and envision Ireland anew with a “true cartographic representation of his country, which would have erased and disregarded its conquerors.” At its center will be the pool, a sacred source from which all other life springs. Obsessed by this notion, Tomás frightens Liam and the villagers, one of whom calls in a hateful Jesuit priest to perform an exorcism. Though traumatized by the experience, Tomás moves his family to the peninsula, to the source.
O’Farrell casts her net back millennia to tell the story of the land, its ancient people and the ethereal—even supernatural—power of the pool. As in Hamnet, O’Farrell skillfully oscillates among the points of view of her characters, sometimes taking wing as a skylark or nosing around as the loyal family dog in order to reveal an aspect of the story the human characters cannot perceive. As ever, O’Farrell’s prose is a gift: Her language is lush and muscular, particularly in descriptions of landscape and foliage.
For Tomás and his kin, the years that follow their move to the peninsula are full of misfortune. Some readers may feel that the parade of tragedies that befall the family beggars belief. But because O’Farrell takes such care in her flashbacks to Tomás’ childhood during the Great Famine, we know that the setbacks and betrayals in this saga are consequences of that disaster. The famine may have spared Tomás and Phina, but it reverberates in the lives of their children. Yet nature endures: The peninsula, the copse and its pool survive the waves of conquerors. “You will never understand how the land remembers,” Tomás tells the priest just before the exorcism. Land is a story of great losses—and greater power.