Land by Maggie O’Farrell

A Breathtaking New Novel from the Author of Hamnet — Where Land, History, and Memory Refuse to Be Erased

In Land, the extraordinary new novel from New York Times bestselling and Women’s Prize-winning author Maggie O’Farrell, a father and son mapping Ireland for the British in the 1860s stumble upon something ancient and powerful that will echo through generations.

Tomás and his reluctant young son Liam are working for the Ordnance Survey, charting a remote, windswept peninsula in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. But when Tomás encounters a mysterious pre-Christian holy spring, something shifts. He begins to see the land — and Ireland’s story — differently. What starts as a quiet act of resistance becomes a profound reckoning with colonization, loss, belonging, and the stories that shape us.

Spanning centuries and crossing oceans, Land weaves together the intimate and the epic: a family fractured by tragedy and migration, the hidden histories buried in the soil, and the enduring power of place. Rich with myth, folklore, and breathtaking natural detail, it is a novel about what we inherit, what we remember, and what refuses to be forgotten.

Moving, immersive, and deeply humane, Land confirms Maggie O’Farrell as one of the most gifted storytellers of our time — a writer who finds the universal in the deeply personal and the timeless in the most specific of landscapes.