Mapping Ireland’s Past: Maggie O’Farrell’s Sweeping Tale of Land, Loss and Colonialism

Maggie O’Farrell, the acclaimed author of the bestselling and screen-adapted Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, returns with Land, her eleventh book. Born in Northern Ireland, O’Farrell returns to the island as one of the central presences in Land, a novel set ten years after the devastating Great Famine. At its heart is Tomàs, a mapmaker tasked with surveying Ireland alongside his son, Liam. Their work forms part of a colonial project to replace Irish place names with English ones. But when Tomàs wanders into a mysterious grove on a remote peninsula, his encounter with the unknown sets in motion a profound transformation, altering the course of his life and that of his entire family. Moving fluidly across time and continents, Land weaves an expansive tale of Ireland, its faith, its landscapes and its people. Readers familiar with Hamnet will recognise O’Farrell’s evocative prose and her gift for creating vivid, deeply human characters whose lives linger in the imagination. With Tomàs and his family at its centre, O’Farrell crafts a sweeping narrative in which the violence of colonialism meets the uncanny, blending historical fiction and magical realism into a richly layered portrait of a land and its people.