Land - Hardcover

O'Farrell, Maggie

 
9780593320648: Land
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593320646 ISBN 13: 9780593320648
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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 Blight.

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

Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

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His father was ever a man of few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfa­miliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.
__

The morning had been a long one, Liam and his father out since dawn. A north-westerly breeze has been at them for hours, scrupu­lous in its self-appointed work of lifting the caps from their heads, in hurling a scree of water over them. Liam stands on what he would call a hillock and his father a drumlin or tulach, holding the end of the chain and the surveying pole in hands that are scarlet with cold. He is scrawny, in short trousers and a handed-down jacket that has been mended and re-mended by his mother. Her patches, with their fret­ted edges, have to Liam the fascinating appearance of postage stamps. He likes to rub at the stitches, those marks of maternal patience and devotion, with the side of his thumb. He imagines, at night, when he catches sight of the jacket hanging on a peg, that it might take off through the darkness on a journey across oceans and mountains, borne along by his mother’s faceless, stateless stamps. Not that he would tell anyone this: at ten years old, he has lately attained the awareness that such flights of fancy should not be divulged.

The year is 1865, the place a narrow promontory of land lapped on either side by cold blue inlets: a peninsula, stretching out into the Atlantic, like an imploring hand, the westernmost scrap of Eu­rope before it surrenders to icy cross-currents of a vast ocean. As Liam waits there, on his hillock, buffeted nearly off his feet by saline gusts, he brings up a hand to worry at the corner of his elbow patch—a minuscule snarl resides there, a place where his mother has been obliged to knot and retie her darning thread, something he knows she is loath to do.

He is startled by a sudden noise. His father, at the other end of the measuring chain, perhaps twenty or thirty yards away, reduced by distance to nothing more than a little peg man, like the ones his sisters make with fabric scraps, is yelling something at him—what Liam’s schoolmaster would term an imperative—but the greedy breeze snatches away the words. Liam stands more upright, wishing to signal that he is paying attention. His father is gesturing, brandish­ing his arm. Could he be instructing him to straighten the chain or to move the pole? It is what he most often shouts at Liam.

The boy adjusts the stick with one hand, tugs at the heavy links with the other. His father is still yelling from his matching hilltop, still motioning, waving his tripod. Liam waits, anxiety trickling through his chest. He sees his father throw down his instruments and stride towards him. He licks the salt from his lips and tries not to shiver. His father doesn’t like to see him affected by weather: a sign of weakness in a man, he calls it.
__

What does Tomás see as he walks from the pinnacle of one drumlin to the next (counting his strides, as is his habit)? The bedraggled figure of his only son, faithfully holding the surveying pole, a child dear to his heart, whom he will perhaps take back to their lodgings soon because this is no weather to stay out in, a person too young for the job he has been given.

If only it were so.

Tomás, as he feels the slope of the first drumlin level out under his boots and then the incline of the second start to lift him up, sees only this: a gradient of perhaps 1:3, topological landforms caused by glacial activity, a valley scraped and forced to submit to a U-shape by the slow force of ice, to his left the rearing structure of a high rocky outcrop of likely volcanic origin, a smoothness of moraine. And in the middle of this abundance of cartographic detail is an irregular greyish mark that does not belong there—a human, a small one, with bare knees, a cap, under which is some hair the colour of copper coins, and a surveying pole tilted at an inefficacious angle.

Without warning, his gaze, passing over the landscape, is arrested by a curious fissure in the southernmost slope. Filled with a dense copse, from which flows a reasonable-sized stream, it is a geographi­cal feature not shown on the existing map sheet, making it Tomás’s responsibility to measure and survey it for the necessary revision.

Tomás sighs. He removes his own cap and uses it to wipe the moisture from his forehead. He doesn’t feel the cold, doesn’t mind the rain. I am waterproof, he likes to say to the scarlet-jacketed sol­diers who employ him for their great mapping project. The redcoats, who come from over the water, bare their teeth in a smile and roll up the charts and sketches he creates. Tomás is useful to them, he knows, not so much for his surveying and draughtsman skills—there are plenty to be found over the water who can do such things—but harder to find someone who has these abilities and can also speak to the locals in their own language. Tomás may be classified in their accounts and ledgers as a “labourer” but the soldier-men cannot do without him. He is the only one of their division who can measure and calculate, draw detailed draft maps in ink for the engravers to copy, and also converse with the people about where the boundar­ies lie, who owns which field, what this valley or that bluff is called and why, where might the ruins of this building be. He alone is able to parse a polysyllabic string comprehensible only to those who have lived here for generations: he makes the-crossroads-under-the-bluff-where-once-a-hailstorm-killed-a-cockerel read “Bluff’s Cross” and renders the-strand-where-the-yellow-periwinkles-gather-in-spring into “Yellowcove.” In a tent set up in a field or a town square, the redcoat sappers and surveyors will mill around behind Tomás, half listening, while he negotiates with a crowd of people a toponymic compromise over a mountain known by one name to those who live on its eastern slopes and quite another to those on its north. Or he untangles from several shouted accounts who the landowner was before this one, and the one before that. Then the redcoats step forward; they take these revisions away to their barracks and their camps; they collate them; they sign their names to Tomás’s work; they print their maps and put them in a cabinet somewhere in their city.

So lost is he in his reverie that when he gains the higher ground and someone taps him on the elbow, he is startled to find a person of short stature, looking up at him, mouthing something.

“What?” Tomás yelps.

His son, Liam, quivering like a wet hound, speaks again but his words are whirled away into the fog. Tomás permits the child to cling to his damp jacket hem as he looks around them: a good vantage point, this. The land slopes away from the drumlin in all directions, as if he and his son are standing on a bolt of cloth tweaked aloft by immense and invisible fingertips. They are ninety feet or so above the unmapped copse to the south, a comparable distance to an old field boundary with a gatepost to the west, the volcanic outcrop behind them, the clutter of the village—or what remains of it—to be seen below. On an elevated piece of ground, a quarter of a mile away, stands the ruin of an isolated dwelling place, also absent from the map—roofless, walls bared to the sky, like crumbling teeth, a sapling sprouting from what would have been the chimney breast.

Anyone observing Tomás at this moment would see the muscles in his jaw tighten. It is a necessary but unenviable part of his cur­rent task to distil...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593320646
ISBN 13 
9780593320648
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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