Land

Ireland, 1840s–1865. Tomás, a survivor of the Great Hunger, works with his ten-year-old son Liam on the British Ordnance Survey, mapping a remote Atlantic peninsula whose communities still bear the marks of death, eviction and emigration. Tomás is determined that the official map should record more than coastlines and place names, but an unsettling encounter in an ancient copse changes him so profoundly that Liam must confront the possibility of completing their work and finding a way home without the father he knew.

The story moves through the lives of an extended Irish family, reaching back into the famine years and outward to Dublin, Rome, Canada and India. Buried treasure, local legend, persistent ghosts and the memories held by the landscape connect separation with reunion and colonial measurement with personal loss. At its centre is the question of how land preserves the histories that governments, maps and families attempt to erase.