Historical fiction novel Land by Maggie O’Farrell has hit the shelves.
Set in Ireland in the years before and after The Great Hunger, the story follows Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, as they are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland, with Tomás determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
However, Tomás’ work and life are suddenly upended by an unsettling encounter in a grove of trees, shifting the narrative into a survival and coming-of-age story, forcing young Liam to find a way to complete the map and safely get them both home.
In an interview, Maggie stated that the novel is based on the few things she knows about her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the British Ordnance Survey on the second revision of the maps of Ireland just after the Great Famine.
“It always struck me as a very strange and charred task,” she said.
“I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like for him who lived through that huge cataclysm in Ireland and then to be part of the teams who were making sure that all the terrible changes that had wrought by physical and human geography, all those changes were set down in the map.
“I’ve been trying to track him down as much as I possibly could. It was tricky, though, because if you were Irish and worked for the Ordnance Survey in the mid-century you weren’t allowed to sign your own work,” she added.
The Irish novelist is best known for her 2020 novel Hamnet, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed namesake film, released in 2025.