Land : a novel / Maggie O'Farrell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Farrell, Maggie, 1972- Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ireland--History--1837-1901--Fiction.

Ireland.

Ireland--History--Famine, 1845-1852--Fiction.

Ireland--Social conditions--19th century--Fiction.

Fathers and sons--Fiction.

Fathers and sons.

Surveying--Fiction.

Surveying.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Novels.

Psychological fiction.

Physical Description:

383 pages : maps ; 25 cm

Edition:

First hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2026.

Summary:

"The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger"-- Provided by publisher.

In 1865, surveyor Tomás and his ten-year-old son Liam travel a remote Atlantic peninsula as part of the British Ordnance Survey's effort to map Ireland after the Great Hunger. Determined to preserve evidence of the famine's devastation in his work, Tomás becomes psychologically altered after a disturbing encounter in a woodland copse. As British officers approach expecting the survey's completion, Liam must confront his father's unraveling and attempt to guide them home. Set against the legacies of famine and colonial rule, the novel explores memory, survival, family separation, and the persistence of history in the Irish landscape.

"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 unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of 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, colonization 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. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time."--Book jacket flap.

Notes:

"A Borzoi Book"--Title page verso.

Maps on end papers.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copies: Gift of Nora Barry.

Other Format:

Online version O'Farrell, Maggie Land

ISBN:

9780593320648

0593320646

OCLC:

1535594466