The highly anticipated new novel from Maggie O’Farrell, author of “Hamnet,” is a sweeping generational saga that weaves ancient folklore with colonization, rebellion and survival.
By Ramsey County Library
Genre: Historical fiction, folk fantasy
Set in Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Famine in 1865, “Land” follows Tomás, a surveyor working for the British Ordnance Survey, and his ten-year-old son Liam. Together, they assist in remapping the country by rendering Irish place names into English.
After Tomás has a mysterious, transformative encounter near an ancient sacred spring hidden deep in a wooded copse, he abandons the colonial project to pursue something far more personal: a true map of the land as it really is, rather than whatever order others might impose upon it.
As Tomás uses his family’s savings to lease ruined land and begin again, the novel follows his children as they forge their own separate destinies across the following decades. Threaded through the family drama are ancient folklore, ocean voyages, love stories, rebellion and the deep, enduring
conflict between an indigenous people and the colonial power that sought to erase their identity.
Drawing on her own family history, O’Farrell was haunted by the strangeness of this task and found a connection. Her great-great-grandfather had carried out the same type of work in post-Famine Ireland, documenting a landscape still scorched by catastrophe, mapping villages that no longer existed and recording the names of people who had starved or fled. That personal connection gives the novel an urgency and authenticity that resonates throughout every page.
O’Farrell also reaches back millennia into the mythic past of the land itself to reveal the sacred spring at the story’s center, something that has borne witness to Irish life across centuries. Publisher Knopf describes the novel as a story of “separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion” and, above all, survival.
“Land” is a book for readers who love richly layered historical fiction, multi-generational family stories and writing that takes the landscape itself as a living, breathing character.
Fans of “Hamnet” will find much to love here, though “Land” is entirely its own thing with a
larger scope, deeper history and more mythic in spirit.
Find copies of “Land” at the Ramsey County Library or on Libby. Find past Ramsey County Library Books of the Month here.
