Land
On sale
11th March 2027
Price: £10.99
‘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.
‘A heart-bursting story of resilience and love’ LOUISE KENNEDY
‘A story that has such heart’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Wild, urgent, mystical… proves again that Maggie O’Farrell is the best of us’ VIRGINIA EVANS
‘Darkly magical. A brilliant and powerful novel’ ALICE WINN
‘Magnificent… a feat of the historical imagination’ INDEPENDENT
‘Full of vigour… O’Farrell excels’ NEW YORKER
‘As visceral as a novel can get’ YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN
On a windswept peninsula in 1865, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam are working on a project to map the whole of Ireland – a challenging task in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. Tomás is determined that his maps will bear witness to the disaster.
When Tomás is sent off course by a mysterious encounter in a wood, his life, and that of his family, will never be the same. Now Liam must somehow finish the work himself, and find a way to get them both home.
Tomás’s wife, Phina, is alarmed by the change in her taciturn husband, while Enda, their eldest daughter, still smarts from the injustice of not being allowed to take part in the mapping. Rose, the youngest, fears what lies ahead because it isn’t long before Tomás proposes a huge change for them all.
Land is a story of love and survival, buried treasure, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
A spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of tragedy.
‘A heart-bursting story of resilience and love’ LOUISE KENNEDY
‘A story that has such heart’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Wild, urgent, mystical… proves again that Maggie O’Farrell is the best of us’ VIRGINIA EVANS
‘Darkly magical. A brilliant and powerful novel’ ALICE WINN
‘Magnificent… a feat of the historical imagination’ INDEPENDENT
‘Full of vigour… O’Farrell excels’ NEW YORKER
‘As visceral as a novel can get’ YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN
On a windswept peninsula in 1865, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam are working on a project to map the whole of Ireland – a challenging task in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. Tomás is determined that his maps will bear witness to the disaster.
When Tomás is sent off course by a mysterious encounter in a wood, his life, and that of his family, will never be the same. Now Liam must somehow finish the work himself, and find a way to get them both home.
Tomás’s wife, Phina, is alarmed by the change in her taciturn husband, while Enda, their eldest daughter, still smarts from the injustice of not being allowed to take part in the mapping. Rose, the youngest, fears what lies ahead because it isn’t long before Tomás proposes a huge change for them all.
Land is a story of love and survival, buried treasure, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
Reviews
A deep-mapping of a place and its people, a heart-bursting story of resilience and love. Land is simply the best novel I've read in years
Haunting and elemental in its evocation, Land is a novel of startling imagination and power. Upon finishing it, I did not feel so much that I had read a book as lived inside it
A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds and skies
Wondrous and magisterial
A stunning achievement. Maggie O'Farrell's most ambitious novel yet, and maybe her most moving. I adored it.
Expansive and intimate, this beautiful book swallowed me whole. I loved it, and will miss its characters terribly
A work of towering imagination and empathy; a beautifully layered novel, told in lyrical, haunting prose which transforms familiar history into something new and startlingly relevant. To read this novel is to embark on an emotional journey, to lose yourself in the pages of a story that is at once devastating and irrepressibly life affirming. I loved it
As visceral as a novel can get
Land is a vast, darkly magical novel from a masterful writer. Maggie O'Farrell's historical fiction illuminates not only the past, but our own moment in time. A brilliant and powerful novel
This deep, dense, heartrending novel is the best of Maggie O'Farrell, who is the best of writers, modern and alive, with the detailed brilliance of great nineteenth-century storytellers. All I need as a reader is in Land
A stunning and gorgeous epic. . . . O'Farrell paints a devasting yet tender portrait of Irish history
Land is a hidden grove of a book. Since leaving its pages, the stories hiding in place-names and redacted maps have seemed palpable in my everyday life. I loved the characters, the slowing effect of O'Farrell's prose and her careful splicing of story into history
A visceral and magical story about separation, and our complex relationship with the world beyond words
Beautifully done, with descriptions that are both intricate and locked into character
Evocative and immersive . . . a haunting, beautifully written story of survival and memory
Sweeping and vast, Land is a captivating story of family and how the land we share carries our stories
Powerfully affecting . . . expert plotting and perspective
Her most far-reaching, ambitious novel to date . . . a story of grief, trauma, resilience and recovery. A story that has such heart . . . With Land, O'Farrell might snag a Booker nomination
I think that people will hugely love this book. It's a big, sweeping, Irish, multi-generational story. The writing's wonderful. There's magic elements to it. It's a real crowd-pleaser of a book
This is a rich, irresistible story, as intoxicating as the water Tomás drank in that "unquiet place" amid the trees
Luminous... astonishingly vivid... fills in with precision and passion a detailed map of nineteenth century Ireland
Land is the book I am always looking for, a saturated, page-turning story with a vivid sense of place and extraordinary people. In Land Maggie O'Farrell tells the truth through the fiction with this exquisite perfection of language, an openness to the unknown mysteries of the world, and her fingers on the pulse of what makes us human. I was laid flat by this wild, urgent, mystical and sure-footed novel, which proves again that Maggie O'Farrell is the best of us.