Land

Land

By:

Maggie O'Farrell

Spice Scale
Number of books
1 Published
KU
❌
Audiobook
✅
Series Status
Complete
Interconnected
N/A
Overall Rating
Coming Soon

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS • One of Indigo's Best Books of 2026 • Waterstones • Barnes & Noble • A Best Book of the Year (So Far): Vogue • Amazon

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger.

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 unexpectedly 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 novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It 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.

As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.

Jamie’s review

Just when you think it can't get any more depressing… it does! 😭 I am not AS mad as I was after reading Wild Dark Shore (😡) because there is somewhat of a satisfying outcome at the end of the book. But the same angry energy is within me.

I'm irritated because I do actually REALLY like the writing. And I liked all the characters. I wanted good things to happen for them, but turns out, good things don't happen when you live on an Irish peninsula in 1865.

I had a feeling I would be let down and so I tried to mentally prepare myself. But I was still let down. I can't handle when NOTHING good happens in a book. Not for me. Sigh.