The title of Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, carries much weight. We start on a windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland in the 1860s, where Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, are helping the British Ordnance Survey compile accurate mapping of the district. We know two things from the opening pages. One is that when Liam grows up he is going to be “on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement on him”.
And we know, too, from the portentous way in which landscape and weather are described, that father and son are going to draw a map which tells the true story of the land, which has been occupied by the “redcoats”.
