Excerpt from Land by Maggie O'Farrell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

His thoughts are snipped short by the recollection that his son should have reached the copse by now. Tomás gives himself an almost visible shake: why has he allowed his thoughts to run along such fanciful pathways? He shades his eyes with his hand and peers into the mist.

____

Liam trudges the distance towards the cluster of trees tucked into a hollow between two hills. He glances back to find out if his father is watching him, but sees only a gaunt outline etched against a shift¬ing, liquid sky. In an unaccustomed act of rebellion, Liam tosses the surveying pole to the ground. He's sick of carrying it, sick to his back teeth.

He moves towards the copse, talking in his mind to his sister, Enda, who is not quite a year older than him: Sick to my back teeth, he tells her. You should see the way he orders me about, like I'm a donkey or a dog, and you wouldn't believe the weather he has me out in.

Enda had been acutely disappointed that she hadn't been taken on this mapping expedition, but their father had said it was no work for a girl. Liam will tell her, when they get back, that she was the lucky one, getting to stay at home. He is exploring his own emerging back teeth, as he steps between the first tree trunks, feeling the hard, pearly nubs erupting from his tender pink gums.

Then he pauses. Later that night, he will wonder why. Was it that he stopped or did something stop him? Which way round was it?

The quality of light in the copse is immediately different, ver¬dant and lustrous, glimmering with the trembling of the leaf canopy. The wind vanishes, as does the relentless rain. He is enclosed and enfolded, as if he has stepped inside the secret green house of a giant. Liam looks up: the tops of the trees separate and collide in the breeze, revealing and concealing the opaline sky. He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators. Underfoot, the ground is spongy with damp. It oozes from the soil, the leaf-rot; it sucks and grips at his boot soles. He glances down and sees that there is thick, luxuri¬ant moss, glistening and emerald-bright, blanketing everything: the humps of stones, the long cylinders of fallen branches, the ridged splay of roots, unidentifiable mounds that suggest loaves of bread or animal lairs. Or tiny graves.

Excerpted from Land by Maggie O'Farrell. Copyright © 2026 by Maggie O'Farrell. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.