Land: A Novel

Description

New York Times bestseller Land is a soaring historical novel from Maggie O’Farrell, the award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. Set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger, it is a spellbinding story of separation, reunion, tragedy, recovery and survival.

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 stand as 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 the lives of his family, will never be the same again.

Liam is frightened by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What has caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, supposed to finish the mapping and get them both home?

Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a loyal dog and the truth that, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.