Maggie O'Farrell for Land

EARLY BIRD VOUCHER - SOLD OUT

"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

We are so pleased to announce that the wonderful Maggie O'Farrell will be joining us to celebrate her latest novel, Land.

Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, 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 survival with resilience and love.

Land 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.

All places booked are fully redeemable against a stamped author signature copy of Land - exclusive to the Land tour.

We can't wait to see you there!

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomas 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. Tomas, 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 Tomas is 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 Tomas and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I Am, I am, I am, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Hamnet has been made into a film and Maggie co-wrote the screenplay with Academy-Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. The film has won Best Motion Picture - Drama at the Golden Globes and the audience award at multiple film festivals including Telluride, Toronto and London. Her other novels include After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mind, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be The Place, and The Marriage Portrait, which was shortlisted for The Woman's Prize. She lives in Edinburgh.