'Hamnet' author Maggie O'Farrell discusses new book

Critically acclaimed, award-winning author Maggie O'Farrellwill discuss her latest novel,Land, on Thursday, July 2, at Vanderbilt University. O'Farrell will be in conversation with authorAriel Lawhonbeginning at 2 p.m. in the Commodore Ballroom at the Student Life Center, 310 25th Ave. S. Doors will open at 1 p.m. The event is hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard LibrariesandDialogue Vanderbiltin collaboration withParnassus Books.Tickets for the talk (www.eventbrite.com/e/author-event-with-maggie-ofarrell-tickets-1987527059939) are $35.50 each and include one general admission seat and a pre-stamped copy of Land, to be published by Penguin Random House on June 2. There will be no signing line for book personalizations at this event.About the book O'Farrell, the bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. 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 recently 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. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What caused such cracks to open in Tom��s, and how is Liam, age 10, 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 varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival—for our times and for all time. A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds and skies, writes Daniel Mason, author of North Woods.About the author O'Farrell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her 2020 novel Hamnet received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction. O'Farrell co-adapted Hamnet for the screen with Chloé Zhao and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2026. Her other novels include 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 also has written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.About the moderator Lawhon is the New York Times bestselling author of The Frozen River and other historical fiction. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and served as Good Morning America and One Book, One County selections. She lives outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and four sons.