Maggie O'Farrell

MAGGIE O'FARRELL
presents her new novel "Land"

Anyone who loves film will have felt the pull of "Hamnet" earlier this year - the multiple Oscar-nominated adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel, with Jessie Buckley as Agnes Hathaway. Now the Irish-British author follows up with her tenth novel: "Land" (Piper; translated by Nikolaus Hansen and Kathrin Razum) opens in 1865 and takes us to Ireland. O'Farrell tells the story of Tomás and his young son Liam, tasked by the Ordnance Survey with mapping the land - a land still scarred by the Great Famine. Between 1845 and 1849, it claimed a million lives, twelve percent of the Irish population.

After a mystical encounter in a forest, the formerly taciturn Tomás begins to talk without stopping, convinced that his maps can bear witness to the catastrophe and protect his homeland: "You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots go." O'Farrell's prose is allusive, poetic, and overflowing - she weaves the fate of Ireland and its people together with a landscape that is at once barren and deeply compelling. "Der Spiegel" calls it: "A great book about a small country."

Moderation (English-German): Tobias Rüther
German reading: Julia Wieninger

With the kind support of the Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg