The new book by Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell will be her most Irish novel yet, her publisher has said.
O’Farrell described her 10th novel, Land, due out next June, as one “I’ve always wanted to write”.
It will be a multi-generational epic ranging from a peninsula in the west of Ireland to Canada and India, according to her publisher Tinder Press.
It is inspired by the Co Derry-born award-winning author’s own family history and her deep personal attachment to the Irish landscape.
RM Block
O’Farrell said the opening for the novel came to her in a sentence: “Three or so years ago, I was staring out of the window on a long and delayed train journey when a sentence appeared in my head: His father was ever a man of few words.
“I pictured a man and a reluctant child on a rain-soaked hillside, with surveying tools in hand. I knew immediately that I had the opening to a novel I’d been mulling for a long time - a novel about a father and son mapping together in the west of Ireland.”
In Land, Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, are working for the Ordnance Survey which is mapping the whole of Ireland. It’s 1865 and the country has been decimated by the Great Hunger. Tomás is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
O’Farrell, who was born in Coleraine in 1972 to Irish parents but grew up in Britain, said: “Every family has its myths; I had always heard that one of my antecedents had worked on the early maps of Ireland, but I had no idea how much truth was in this.
“My great-great-grandfather was not an easy man to find. It was a search that would take me to dusty stacks of archives, to churchyards, to holy wells, to windswept beaches along the Wild Atlantic Way, to remote islands and rocky hillsides.
“He had, I discovered, worked as a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the 1850s, not long after the Great Hunger had ravaged the country. What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time, to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”
2026 promises to be a significant year for O’Farrell. The film adaptation of her novel Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, will be released on January 9th. It stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and is directed by Chloé Zhao, who won an Oscar for Nomadland and co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell.
O’Farrell’s novels have sold more than four million copies in the UK and Ireland and been translated into 43 languages. Hamnet was also Waterstones’ Book of the Year. Her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award.
Her sixth novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, is about an Irish family in London whose father walks out of the house during the 1976 heatwave and never comes home. This Must Be The Place is the story of the relationship between a reclusive actor, who has walked away from her celebrity life and made a home in the wilds of Donegal, and an Irish-American academic.
“I don’t know why I didn’t write about [Ireland] for [so long],” she told The Irish Times in 2016. “For such a small country Ireland has such an enormous literary reputation, and rightly so. So I suppose I felt a bit wary.”
As a child, O’Farrell said she experienced anti-Irish racism: “We used to get endless Irish jokes, even from teachers. If I had to spell my name at school teachers would say things like, ‘Oh, are your family in the IRA?’ Teachers would say this to a 12-year-old kid in front of the whole class.”
When her father, who is from Dublin, phoned her at the office in London where she was working in the early 1990s, a colleague said, “Oh, I thought he was going to give us a two-minute warning to get out of the building”. “It was gobsmacking. They thought it was hilarious to say, ‘Ha ha, your dad’s a terrorist’. It wasn’t funny at all.”
