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Land

Pages
448
Published
2026
Language
English

Synopsis

'You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow' A spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of tragedy. 'A heart-bursting story of resilience and love' Louise Kennedy'Haunting and elemental' Ferdia Lennon 'Darkly magical. A brilliant and powerful novel' Alice Winn 'This beautiful book swallowed me whole' Charlotte McConaghy 'A work of towering imagination and empathy' Roisín O'Donnell 'As visceral as a novel can get' Yael van der Wouden 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 sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and 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 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.

About the author

M
Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland) is an Irish-British novelist and memoirist. Raised in Wales and Scotland after a childhood illness (encephalitis at age eight) that she has said shaped her love of reading, she now lives in Edinburgh. Her novels include After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (Costa Novel Award), Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place, Hamnet (Women's Prize for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle...

Characters

TomásProtagonist

Irish mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey in 1865 whose life is transformed by an encounter at an ancient copse.

LiamProtagonist

Tomás's ten-year-old son during the survey, who later becomes a Jesuit missionary in India.

PhinaSupporting

Tomás's wife, a Great Famine survivor and workhouse escapee, and mother of their four children.

EndaSupporting

The eldest daughter, restless and musically gifted, who later emigrates to Quebec as a laborer.

RoseSupporting

One of Tomás and Phina's children, steady and gentle, who tries to hold the family together.

All characters in Land
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