Land by Maggie O'Farrell

Land is the tenth novel from Maggie O'Farrell, whose Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020. Her publisher calls it her most ambitious book, and it is a wide one: a story that starts with a single family and opens out across generations.

It begins in 1865, on a peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, in the years after the Great Famine. Tomas and his reluctant ten-year-old son Liam are working for the British Ordnance Survey, mapping the land. In an old copse, Tomas has an encounter that unsettles everything, and the family's course is changed for good.

From there the novel follows what that moment sets in motion, across time and across continents. O'Farrell drew on a story from her own family: an ancestor who worked on the early maps of Ireland.

Historical fiction for readers of Hannah Kent and Geraldine Brooks, and for anyone who loved Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait.

'This beautiful book swallowed me whole.' Charlotte McConaghy, author of Migrations

'A heart-bursting story of resilience and love.' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses