Maggie O’Farrell has a new novel coming in 2026, People magazine reports.
Knopf will publish the Northern Irish author’s Land next spring. The press describes the book as “a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger.”
O’Farrell made her literary debut in 2000 with the novel After You’d Gone and followed that up with books including My Lover’s Lover, Instructions for a Heatwave, and This Must Be the Place.
In 2020, she published Hamnet, a historical novel about William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in the book), grieving the death of their 11-year-old son. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction, it and has been adapted into a film directed by Chloé Zhao, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, which is scheduled to open in theaters on Wednesday.
Land, Knopf says, will follow Tomás and his son, Liam, who are working to create a map of Ireland around the time of the country’s Great Famine in the mid 19th century. Tomás has a frightening encounter that changes his personality, and Liam must scramble to finish the map and return home with Tomás.
“Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion,” Knopf says. “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.”
Land is slated for release on June 2, 2026.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
