Land: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait comes Land, a soaring, intimate, and epic historical novel set in Ireland in the decades before and after the Great Hunger.

On a windswept peninsula jutting into the Atlantic in 1865, Tomás and his reluctant young son, Liam, are working for the British Ordnance Survey, mapping a famine-ravaged Ireland for the occupying forces. When Tomás has a profound, almost mystical encounter at a pre-Christian holy spring, he abandons his official duties and begins secretly creating his own dissident map of the land—an act of quiet rebellion and reclamation.

Spanning generations and crossing from rural Ireland to Dublin, Rome, Quebec, and beyond, Land weaves together stories of separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and resistance. It is a novel about buried treasure, persistent ghosts, ancient woodlands, a remarkably loyal dog, overlapping lives, and the enduring power of place. When it comes to both land and history, nothing ever truly disappears.

Maggie O’Farrell’s luminous prose brings to life the beauty and brutality of the Irish landscape and the resilience of its people in a story that feels at once deeply personal and grandly mythic. A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces and the human spirit.

Perfect for fans of Maggie O’Farrell’s previous works, literary historical fiction, Irish literature, family sagas, and readers who loved Hamnet, The Nightingale, or North Woods. Ideal for book clubs and anyone drawn to richly textured stories of love, loss, memory, and belonging.