With Land, 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.
LitStackers! Line up for this one. In presale now, Knopf | Penguin Random House will release Land by Maggie O’Farrell on June 2, 2026. Early word suggests an immersive and exciting novel. While details remain scarce, the publisher’s description and the cover art hint at a reading experience that will linger long after you turn the last page. Here’s the scoop and early praise on this next must-read. Dip into the book fund for this one!
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In This Spotlight On Land
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About Land
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.
Praise for Land
“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
“Land is a vast, darkly magical novel from a masterful writer. Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction illuminates not only the past, but our own moment in time. A brilliant and powerful novel.”—Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
“This deep, dense, heartrending novel is the best of Maggie O’Farrell, who is the best of writers, modern and alive, with the detailed brilliance of great nineteenth-century storytellers. All I need as a reader is in Land.”—Amy Bloom, author of In Love
“Land is as visceral as a novel can get. It feels deeply and it tells deeply, both of nature and of the small tragedy of man. It’s rare to find a story so grand told with such a fine brush. Land read to me as ancient and brand-new all at once, and something best experienced by diving into it headfirst.”—Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep
“Expansive and intimate, this beautiful book swallowed me whole. I loved it and will miss its characters terribly.”—Charlotte McConaghy, author of Wild Dark Shore
“Wondrous and magisterial.”—Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
“A deep-mapping of a place and its people, a heart-bursting story of resilience and love. Land is simply the best novel I’ve read in years.”—Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
“Haunting and elemental in its evocation, Land is a novel of startling imagination and power. Upon finishing it, I did not feel so much that I had read a book as lived inside it.”—Ferdia Lennon, author of Glorious Exploits
“A stunning achievement. Maggie O’Farrell’s most ambitious novel yet, and maybe her most moving. I adored it.”—Bobby Palmer, author of Main Characters
About Maggie O’Farrell, Author of Land
Maggie O’Farrell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.
You can connect with Maggie O’Farrell on her website, and on Facebook.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Knopf | Penguin Random House
ISBN Hardcover 9780593320648
Pub Date: June 2, 2026
LitStack Spots by Maggie O’Farrell
We’ve also spotted these titles by Maggie O’Farrell that we are adding to our TBR stack, including Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell, and Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell.
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