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A Novel
by Maggie O'Farrell
Book Reviewed by: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, colonization 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 varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.
Excerpt
Land
His father was ever a man of few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfa¬miliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.
____
The morning had been a long one, Liam and his father out since dawn. A north-westerly breeze has been at them for hours, scrupu¬lous in its self-appointed work of lifting the caps from their heads, in hurling a scree of water over them. Liam stands on what he would call a hillock and his father a drumlin or tulach, holding the end of the chain and the surveying pole in hands that are scarlet with cold. He is scrawny, in short trousers and a handed-down jacket that has been mended and re-mended by his mother. Her patches, with their fret¬ted edges, have to Liam the fascinating appearance of postage stamps. He likes to rub at the stitches, those marks of maternal patience and ...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (6/18/2026)
...Patrick Ryan—not for me. :headphone: NOW READING: How to Dodge a Cannonball By Dennard Dayle—a revisionist and humorous Civil War novel. :headphone: Land by Maggie O'Farrell—a man is called into service to map an Irish island. The year is 1865.
-Anne_Glasgow
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (6/11/2026)
Land by Maggie O'Farrell and Whistler by Ann Patchett. Audiobook format for both. Whistler was read by Ann Patchett. Both were hard to turn off…highly recommended.
-Carole_B
Ten-year-old Liam has grown up in the shadow of the famine, which ended not long before he was born, but for Tomás, and for the Irish landscape that he is mapping, the Great Hunger has changed everything, leaving behind a countryside filled with broken families and empty houses. When he wanders into a copse one day, leaving Liam on the hillside to wait for him, he emerges as a changed man. In Land, veteran author Maggie O'Farrell's tenth novel, she shows her prowess at crafting a rich, complex story about colonization and resilience—and Tomás's epiphany in the copse is the novel's crux, as he gazes upon the natural beauty of a sacred space and fully understands, for the first time, the paradox of being asked to record his country's history for its colonizer...continued
Full Review
(780 words)
(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
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. Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
A visceral and magical story about separation, and our complex relationship with the world beyond words.
In the early nineteenth century, Ireland was newly under British rule due to the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished Ireland's parliament, and led the British government to have an interest in recording Irish tenement valuations for taxation purposes. In 1824, a historic ordnance survey commenced—Ireland was about to become the first country to be mapped in its entirety on a scale of six-inches-to-one-mile.
The Ordnance Survey was headed by Thomas Colby, a Colonel in the British military, who worked for the British Board of Ordnance. Colby instructed his workers that this process was to be recorded in great detail in a series of memoirs, which is why we have accounts that have survived to this day. A group of engineers was ...
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