Land

The Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller

‘A breathtaking epic that covers centuries and continents, and an urgent and impassioned mapping of historical change driven by famine, emigration, language loss, secularisation, and much more’ Irish Times

‘Propulsive and luscious throughout’ Fiona Mozley, New York Times

‘O’Farrell is expansive, full of vigor; her characters may die of plague or starve in famines, but she appears to be enjoying herself. The book, which spans Rome, Calcutta, and the “beleaguered dog-shaped country” of Ireland, features tart, nurturing mothers, feisty elder sisters, younger sisters of uncommon beauty, telepathic changelings, farseeing Druids, pompous and hypocritical priests, and steadfast hounds. The passions are big and unembarrassed…O’Farrell excels at world-building’ Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

‘A book to be consumed slowly, rolling every sentence in your mind and heart…As in all her novels, she’s a virtuoso conjuror of characters, a formidable conductor of narrative pace – expanding and compressing time, at once breathless and calm. Land is a moving book, coming at you in waves of subtle and quiet storytelling with bursts of drama, but never rushed…Folded into everything are meditations on death and loss, rendered into a kind of liquid philosophy blended into the narrative – wondrous in its wisdom, yet never alienating or pretentious…It’s as layered as the place [Maggie O’Farrell] writes about. It’s epic and intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.’ Andrea Wulf, New Statesman

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, 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.