Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Some books you read. Others you sink into, like a footprint in wet sand. Land is the latter.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait comes a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years surrounding the Great Hunger.

The year is 1865. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant ten-year-old son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. In a country not long since emptied by the Blight, the task is no small thing. Tomás is determined that his maps will become a record of all that was lost.

But then comes an unsettling encounter in a copse. And everything changes.

What cracked open in his quiet, careful father? And how is a frightened boy meant to finish the mapping alone, and bring them both home?

This is a story of separation and reunion. Of buried treasure and ancient woodland. Of persistent ghosts, a remarkably loyal dog, and the truth that, when it comes to land and history, nothing ever truly goes away.

As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, this is a tale of survival for our times and for all time.

We can’t recommend it enough. It’s the kind of book that begs to be read by a window on a salty, grey afternoon, the ocean murmuring just beyond the glass.

Stop by and let us slip a copy into your hands. We think you’ll linger over every page.

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