Land
Ireland

Land

by Maggie O’Farrell

History Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Family Saga 2026

Summary

Ireland, 1865. On a windswept peninsula overlooking the Atlantic, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam, work on the ambitious Ordnance Survey project to map the entire country. Still haunted by the devastating Great Hunger, Tomás is determined that his maps will preserve a record of the tragedy that transformed Ireland. But when an unsettling encounter in an ancient woodland disrupts his work and changes his behaviour, Liam finds himself struggling to understand his father while facing the daunting task of completing their mission.

As their family’s story unfolds, buried secrets, lingering ghosts, and the enduring power of the Irish landscape reveal how the past continues to shape the present. Spanning generations and exploring the consequences of colonisation, famine, and displacement, Land is a sweeping historical novel about survival, family, and the profound connections between people and the places they call home. Maggie O’Farrell weaves Irish history with folklore and intimate human drama, creating a meditation on memory, belonging, and the ways landscapes preserve stories that history cannot erase.

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About the author
Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is an award-winning British-Irish novelist born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972. She grew up partly in Wales and Scotland and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. Before becoming a full-time novelist, she worked as a journalist and literary editor in Hong Kong and London. Her debut novel, After You’d Gone (2000), won the Betty Trask Award and established her reputation for emotionally intricate storytelling. She went on to write several acclaimed novels, including The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), which won the Costa Novel Award, and This Must Be the Place (2016). Her international breakthrough came with Hamnet (2020), a fictionalised account of the life and death of William Shakespeare’s son. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her subsequent novel, The Marriage Portrait (2022), explores the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici in Renaissance Italy. O’Farrell is also the author of the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017), in which she recounts seventeen encounters with mortality. Her writing frequently explores family, grief, historical memory, and the inner lives of women. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Details
Published
2026
Author
Maggie O’Farrell