Land: A Novel

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 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, Tom¨¢s 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. Tom¨¢s, 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 Tom¨¢s 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 Tom¨¢s and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both homeLand 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.