Maggie O'Farrell for Land

THE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2026

Please note, this is the afternoon event with Maggie (4pm-5pm). For the evening event, please click here.

Each place is £25 and includes a copy of Land.

"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

The wonderful - and now Oscar-nominated - Maggie O'Farrell will be joining us to celebrate her latest novel, Land.

She is the author of Hamnet, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers.

Hamnet has been made into a film, with Maggie co-writing the screenplay with Academy-Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. The film has won Best Motion Picture at the Golden Globes and the Audience Award at multiple film festivals. Maggie has been nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay.

Maggie joins us to celebrate the launch of her highly anticipated new novel Land. We hope you will join us to hear this extraordinary author talk on what will undoubtably be one of the biggest books of the year.

Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Maggie's new novel 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. Maggie will not be able to dedicate books.

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?