‘Hamnet’ Author Maggie O’Farrell Announces New Book ‘Land’ — See the Cover!

Maggie O’Farrell, author of the international bestseller Hamnet, has a new novel on the way!

PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at the forthcoming Land, out next year via Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The novel is set in Ireland in the years before and after The Famine, also known as The Great Hunger, and follows a father and son working on the Great Ordnance Survey, a project which mapped the whole of the country for the British. While the father is determined for their maps to serve as a record of the disaster, his life is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter.

“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,” an official synopsis reads. “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.”

“This is a book I’ve wanted to write for a long time, based on the life of my great-great-grandfather who was employed by the British to work on the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland in the mid-19th century,” O’Farrell said in an exclusive statement to PEOPLE.

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“Land is about a country trying to recover from a cataclysm, the multiple layers of time and how they act upon one small plot of land,” she continues. “Above all it’s about a man trying to retain his sense of history, both personal and universal, in the face of colonization and political upheaval.”

The book features cover art by designer and illustrator is Holly Ovenden.

It’s been a big year for O’Farrell. Her 2020 novel Hamnet, which focuses on William Shakespeare’s courtship with wife Anne Hathaway and the death of their son, was adapted into a 2025 movie of the same name starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Hamnet hits theaters in a limited release over Thanksgiving weekend and will have a wider release on Dec. 12.

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Land will be published on June 2, 2026, and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.