Land

Land by Maggie O'Farrrell Pre-Order now. On sale June 2, 2026.

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

On a windswept peninsula reaching into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant ten-year-old son, Liam, are working on the monumental Ordnance Survey project to map the entirety of Ireland. The year is 1865, and the land—and its people—are still bearing the scars of famine, displacement, and loss. Determined that his maps will preserve the truth of what was destroyed, Tomás sees the survey not as bureaucracy, but as witness.

With British soldiers expected to arrive any day to oversee the work, Tomás is suddenly thrown off course by an unsettling encounter in a nearby copse—an event that fractures his sense of self and alters the fate of his family forever. Liam, bewildered and afraid by the abrupt transformation in his taciturn father, must grapple with an impossible task: to finish the mapping and find a way to get them both home.

Rich with atmosphere and emotional depth, Land is a novel of separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure and overlapping lives, ancient woodland and lingering ghosts, a fiercely loyal dog, and the enduring truth that when it comes to land and history, nothing is ever truly lost.

As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is ultimately a powerful story of survival—for its time, and for all time.