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What to expect

'You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow'

A spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of tragedy.

'Maggie O'Farrell is a miracle in every sense' Ann Patchett
'Maggie O'Farrell takes up a bow and arrow and aims right at the human heart' The Times



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 be 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 sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.

Critics Review

A deep-mapping of a place and its people, a heart-bursting story of resilience and love. Land is simply the best novel I've read in years
Louise Kennedy
A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds and skies
Daniel Mason
Haunting and elemental in its evocation, Land is a novel of startling imagination and power. Upon finishing it, I did not feel so much that I had read a book as lived inside it
Ferdia Lennon
Wondrous and magisterial
Kamila Shamsie
A stunning achievement. Maggie O'Farrell's most ambitious novel yet, and maybe her most moving. I adored it.
Bobby Palmer
Expansive and intimate, this beautiful book swallowed me whole. I loved it, and will miss its characters terribly
Charlotte McConaghy
A work of towering imagination and empathy; a beautifully layered novel, told in lyrical, haunting prose which transforms familiar history into something new and startlingly relevant. To read this novel is to embark on an emotional journey, to lose yourself in the pages of a story that is at once devastating and irrepressibly life affirming. I loved it
Roisín O'Donnell
As visceral as a novel can get
Yael van der Wouden
Land is a vast, darkly magical novel from a masterful writer. Maggie O'Farrell's historical fiction illuminates not only the past, but our own moment in time. A brilliant and powerful novel
Alice Winn
This deep, dense, heartrending novel is the best of Maggie O'Farrell, who is the best of writers, modern and alive, with the detailed brilliance of great nineteenth-century storytellers. All I need as a reader is in Land
Amy Bloom
A stunning and gorgeous epic. . . . O'Farrell paints a devasting yet tender portrait of Irish history
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Land is a hidden grove of a book. Since leaving its pages, the stories hiding in place-names and redacted maps have seemed palpable in my everyday life. I loved the characters, the slowing effect of O'Farrell's prose and her careful splicing of story into history
Amy Jeffs
Author Maggie O'Farrell
Narrator Dane Whyte O'Hara
Duration 16 hours and 47 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781472289117
Format Audiobook
Publisher Headline
Genre Family life fiction, Historical fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE

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