Land

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Best New Book of Summer 2026: TIME • Globe and Mail • The New Statesman • A Best Book of the Year (So Far): Indigo • Vogue • Literary Hub • BookRiot • Women's World • A CIBA Spring Pick • A May 2026 IndieNext Pick • A May 2026 Library Reads Pick • An Amazon Best Book of 2026 So Far • A Spotify Best Fiction Book of the Year So Far • An Apple Best Book of the Year So Far

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.

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 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.

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