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 novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times no.1 bestsellers. Her novels include After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place and The Marriage Portrait, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize. She recently co-wrote - and co-produced - the film adaptation of Hamnet with director Chloé Zhao. Maggie is the author of three books for children, Where Snow Angels Go, The Boy Who Lost His Spark and When the Stammer Came to Stay. Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, she now lives in Edinburgh.

'Land' is published by Headline Publishing Group and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers