In 1865, a father and his ten-year-old son walk an Atlantic peninsula, mapping a country emptied by the Great Hunger. Maggie O'Farrell follows what the survey uncovers in both of them.

Readical Key Points

• A historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger
• By the author of Hamnet, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction
• A New York Times bestseller, with a starred review from Booklist
• Hardcover, 400 pages, Knopf, 2026

Tomás and his son, Liam, are working for the Ordnance Survey, the project to map all of Ireland, and Tomás intends his maps to stand as a record of the famine. When an encounter in a stand of woods sends him off course, Liam is left to wonder what has changed in his father and how the work will ever be finished. The novel reaches across overlapping lives, old woodland and the long memory of the land.

It suits readers of literary historical fiction, readers of O'Farrell's Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and anyone drawn to novels where landscape carries as much weight as character. A map is meant to settle a place. Here it unsettles everyone who makes one.

About the Author

Maggie O'Farrell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and lives in Edinburgh. Her novels include Hamnet, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction; The Marriage Portrait; and The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the Costa Novel Award. She is also the author of the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.

Condition: Brand New and Readical Ready.

Readical™ is an independent bookstore and reading-products brand built around a simple idea: books matter most when what we learn leaves the page and enters our lives.

Apply the Page. Get Readical™.