Land

In 1865, on a windswept peninsula reaching into the Atlantic, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam, are surveying the land for the Ordnance Survey, the project to map the whole of Ireland. Liam is reluctant to be there. The country has barely recovered from the Great Hunger, which left it ravaged and emptied, and Tomás means his maps to stand as a record of that disaster.

British soldiers who oversee the work are due any day and expect it finished. Then Tomás has an unsettling encounter in a copse, and it sends him off course. The father Liam knows, a quiet and taciturn man, changes suddenly, and the boy is frightened by what he sees. The lives of the whole family will not be the same afterward.

The question driving the book is practical and urgent. Liam is only a child, yet he may have to complete the mapping and get both of them home. Along the way the story brings in buried treasure, ancient woodland, ghosts that will not leave, overlapping lives and a very loyal dog.

This is historical fiction with a strong strand of the uncanny. The tone is dark and haunting, and the book keeps returning to how land and history hold on to what happened in them. It also follows a family trying to make a new home after tragedy, with separation, longing and survival all in play.