Celebrate the release of Land: Maggie O'Farrell Book Club

About this event

To celebrate the release of Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Landwe are hosting a very special book club. Join us to talk about your favourite books by Maggie O’Farrell with fellow readers and get your hands on a copy of her newest book!

Chosen as one of Waterstones’ 25 Authors for the Future in 2007, Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell has gone on to become one of Britain’s most acclaimed and popular contemporary fiction writers. In 2020, her novel Hamnet won the Waterstones Book of the Year. Evocatively reimagining the end of Shakespeare’s only son’s short life, this masterful exploration of grief and longing also won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.

Her novels include: After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine (which won a Costa Book Award), Instructions for a Heatwave and This Must Be the Place. In 2017 she released her first non-fiction work, the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.

Land

Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land, the new novel from the author of Hamnet, is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and loss with love and hope.

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?

Please note, Maggie O’Farrell will not be appearing at this event.

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