Land
A Novel
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4.2 • 18 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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.
“A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds, and skies.” —Daniel Mason, author of North Woods
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Maggie O’Farrell is a master of sweeping, emotionally immersive storytelling, and this could be her most breathtaking novel yet. In 19th-century Ireland, a land still recovering from the anguish and disruption of the great famine, mapmaker Tomás and his young son, Liam, travel to a remote Atlantic peninsula to survey territory. But after a strange experience in the woods alters Tomás in ways his family cannot understand, the story expands outward into a multigenerational tale of grief, displacement, folklore, and survival. O’Farrell’s vivid language makes the distant past feel physically immediate. The way she evokes windswept coastlines, ancient forests, cramped and smoky homes, and the ache of hard rural labor is astonishing. Yet for all its epic scope and touches of magical realism, Land is about the complicated bonds between family trying desperately to hold onto one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Farrell (Hamnet) paints a devastating yet tender portrait of Irish history through the story of a Dublin family's relocation to a western peninsula. In 1865, with resentment at British rule growing in Ireland, skilled draftsman Tomás travels with his 10-year-old son, Liam, from Dublin to the secluded outpost. His assignment is to map the area and to establish new English place-names to substitute for traditional Irish ones. But after Tomás discovers a mystical and secluded spring, he's flooded by a newfound sense of purpose, which he attempts to explain to Liam: "My point is, my point is, my point is... that there needs to be a map of how this land really is.... And to do so would be an act of honour. Honour and resistance." Liam is alarmed and confused by his taciturn father's sudden torrent of words, and a local priest worries Tomás has been possessed by the devil. "That well... is a heathen place, pagan and godless," the priest tells Tomás. Forever changed, Tomás moves his family to the peninsula, where older daughter Enda bristles at their isolation while Liam willfully turns toward God and away from his father. Meanwhile, younger daughter Rose longs for stability, and youngest child Eugene silently nurtures his own singular relationship to the land and its history. Mellifluous digressions spotlight the peninsula's earlier settlers, such as a girl named Brith who walks in sealskin shoes on the same ground as Tomás and his family. It's a stunning and gorgeous epic.
