Maggie O'Farrell to publish Land, an epic set in famine-era Ireland

Maggie O’Farrell is returning to Ireland’s Great Hunger through a novel that treats the famine not as backdrop but as a national wound still demanding interpretation. Land, due to be published on 2 June 2026 in the UK and on the same day in the United States, is set in 1865 and follows Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam as they work on the Ordnance Survey mapping project, with Tomás determined that the maps will preserve the devastation of the famine.

The choice of setting gives the novel immediate political weight. The Great Famine killed about one million people, drove about two million more to emigrate, and helped reduce Ireland’s population from close to 8.5 million in 1845 to 6.6 million by 1851. Against that collapse, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland stands as one of the most important state records of the period, the first government-commissioned survey of the whole island in the early 19th century and a source historians still mine for evidence of pre-famine Ireland and what followed.

O’Farrell has said the novel grew out of her own family history. She discovered that her great-great-grandfather worked as a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the 1850s, after the famine had ravaged the country, and that a son of his later painted the tiny medallion portrait that hangs in the hallway of the house where she grew up. She has also said the idea arrived during a delayed train journey, when she suddenly imagined a father and son mapping together on a rain-soaked hillside in the west of Ireland.

Land extends beyond Ireland, following characters to Canada and India, a reminder that famine-era displacement did not stop at the shoreline. The book is being positioned by its publisher as a story of separation, reunion, tragedy, recovery, colonization, rebellion and survival, all bound to the effort to turn landscape into testimony.

The new novel arrives after the screen adaptation of O’Farrell’s 2020 book Hamnet, which she adapted with Chloé Zhao and which stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. With Land, O’Farrell is again working at the point where private memory meets public record, asking what historical fiction can recover emotionally and politically that archives and textbooks cannot.