Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite new novel, Land, is a haunting tale of loss, endurance and renewal. Spanning generations and continents, O’Farrell traces the fragile threads that connect people and place: stories half remembered, names erased, objects carried forward like talismans against oblivion, ghosts that haunt the edges of memory, music that conjures grazed fields and the wind-scratched surface of water. Moving between intimacy and sweeping historical change, the novel reveals the land itself as a living archive of rupture, survival, and belonging.
Land begins in 1860s Ireland, on an unnamed “windswept tongue of land” that branches out in the roiling, icy currents of the Atlantic. A gifted mapmaker, Tomás, and his eldest son, Liam, are busily adjusting their chains and surveying poles, taking measure of the land. Tomás is an employee of the Ordnance Survey, dispatched out west to revise barony maps that no longer conform to a landscape ravaged by hunger and emigration.
