Land: A Novel

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, 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.

Maggie O’Farrell, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include AFTER YOU’D GONE, MY LOVER’S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT. She is also the author of two books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO and THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK. She lives in Edinburgh.

“A rich portrait of family life. . . . Land is a historical novel imbued with O’Farrell’s signature interest in absorbing family relationships. . . . O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout.” —The New York Times

“O’Farrell is expansive, full of rigor. . . . [Land] stages an argument about the virtues of various types of maps—those that are measured, those that are recollected, those that are dreamed. Some of these approaches require meticulous scholarship and technical proficiency; others, an attunement to the invisible realms of feeling and folklore.” —The New Yorker

“Land, O’Farrell’s sweeping tenth novel and third consecutive work of historical fiction, is her most ambitious and dynamic work to date. At the sentence level, its craftsmanship sings; her prose is as lush and imbued with the miraculous as it is lived-in and inviting. . . . O’Farrell renders each member of this family and their respective responses to their new home with the precise and tender intuition that distinguishes her as a storyteller.” —Vulture

“[Land] is ambitious, wide and deep, exploring very Irish themes. . . . O’Farrell’s luminous prose sweeps us from place to place and from time to time.” —The Boston Globe

“A haunting ode. . . . Land is a book of loss and upheaval, but also, ultimately, one that pulses with a luminous sense of hope.” —Vogue

“O’Farrell’s most ambitious novel. . . . With this big, exuberant book, Maggie O’Farrell shows herself to be an artful custodian of tradition, and skilled reciter of ancient lore.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“At once canny and artful, Land manages to transport its reader to a distance time and place while simultaneously alluding obliquely to the concerns of today. . . . Throughout, O’Farrell deftly balances passages of lush, literary description and rumination on loss with nuggets of narrative-fueling conflict.” —Slate

“A soaring, visionary narrative. . . . As the struggling men and women in Land endure defeat and distrust victory, it is their frailty as much as their strength that wins our sympathy and holds our attention.” ­—The Wall Street Journal

“An ambitious, emotionally rich work. . . . O’Farrell has written yet another haunting and deeply humane story.” —Chicago Review of Books

“A powerful epic. . . . Land is lushly written, atmospheric, and heartbreaking—yet it is also a moving paean to perseverance, survival, and forgiveness. . . . A magnificent achievement.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Land is filled with lush, almost fragrant prose. . . . Every word matters, though, which O’Farrell makes clear in the final 130 pages of this epic. . . . The last section of Land is the best thing I’ve read this year.” —Chris Hewitt, The Minnesota Star Tribune

“Just as her character Tomás maps the Irish landscape, Maggie O’Farrell maps an Irish family and once more proves herself a writer of great compassion as she again reminds us of the immense power of connection.” —The Anniston Star

“Epic and devastating. . . . Sometimes—rarely—there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page. A book to be consumed slowly, rolling every sentence in your mind and heart. Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Land is such a book.” —Andrea Wulf, The New Statesman

“O’Farrell’s most ambitious work . . . an epic of Ireland. . . . Perhaps O’Farrell’s greatest feat with Land is her attunement to both the intricacies of human lives and the broader sweep of nationhood.” —Foreign Policy

“A rich, irresistible story. . . . O’Farrell is not just telling a 19th-century story, she’s tilling the fields of those great Victorian novelists who understood that the only thing that redeems the contrivance of an unlikely coincidence is the pleasurable shock it gives us.” —Ron Charles

“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, gor