Land by Maggie O’Farrell

STAFF REVIEW: written in poem form, inspired by reading Land…

Over Millenia – Ancient land & wooded grove – Four waterway confluence – Underground spring & deep, deep pool – Pagan ways being wrested by Church sanctified practice – Colonisers & Crusaders – Blight, famine & workhouse – Land memory & muscle memory – Chainboy, Cartographer & Redcoat – Charting, mapping, organising, re/naming, ordering – Old language to new – deleting history – Changing its course – Father possessed, eldest ordained, youngest touched – Family scatter – Return – Ancient land & wooded grove – Incredibly expansive yet intimate and moving – I loved it.

Reviewed by Jacq

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‘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.

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomas 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. Tomas, 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 Tomas 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 Tomas 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.

An epic portrait of a family navigating the legacy of Ireland’s Great Hunger, Land is Maggie O’Farrell at her spellbinding, inimitable best.

About the Author: Maggie O’Farrell 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, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. She is also the author of three books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO, THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK and WHEN THE STAMMER CAME TO STAY. She lives in Edinburgh.

02 Jun 2026

Land: From the no. 1 bestselling author of Hamnet, a multigenerational epic of loss, hope and reunion by Maggie O’Farrell ISBN 9781472289094