The Mapmaker's Transformation: Maggie O'Farrell on Her New Novel 'Land'

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, "Land," begins on a windswept Irish peninsula in 1865, where a boy named Liam shivers beside his father, Tomás, a cartographer working for the British Army. Sent into a grove to trace a stream, Liam bolts out in terror from something strange and supernatural. His father goes in after him—and doesn’t emerge until the next day, forever changed.

That shift is the heart of "Land," a story rooted in Ireland’s history and soil. The novel follows Tomás and his family as they survive the shadow of the Great Hunger, weaving forward and backward in time from Italy to Canada and back to that unnamed peninsula. O’Farrell says she deliberately left the place unnamed. “I wanted readers to feel mapless—to sense what it was like before a country was mapped,” she explains.

For O’Farrell, the book is deeply personal. Her great-great-grandfather, a surveyor for the Ordnance Survey, inspired Tomás. She spent 15 years hunting for his records, finally finding them in Edinburgh archives just a mile from her home. “It was like striking gold,” she says.

She also visited sacred wells in Ireland, some pre-Christian and still used for healing. One well, said to cure madness, was found to contain high levels of lithium. “For thousands of years, people knew,” she says.

"Land" is out now, a rich meditation on travel, home, and the wild places that refuse to be tamed. O’Farrell’s own childhood summers on Ireland’s west coast echo through every page.