Land | An Evening with Maggie O'Farrell in conversation with Sarah Kavanagh

🎟️ Please note: Tickets are REQUIRED. Each ticket admits two (2) guests into the venue and includes one (1) copy of Land( $32 + tax). Books will be handed out upon entry. Additional books will be available for sale at the event. Can't make the event?

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 not long since 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 again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, 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.

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), 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 has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

Sarah Kavanagh took up her post as Consul General of Ireland in Miami in October 2022 and is leading the establishment of Ireland’s first Consulate General in Florida. The consular area also includes Mississippi, Alabama, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Ms. Kavanagh came to Miami from the Human Rights Unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin where she served as Deputy Director. Prior to joining the Department in 2020, Ms. Kavanagh served as Special Adviser to the Minister for Justice and Equality (2017-2020) and Special Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade (2014-2017). From 2005-2014, she worked for in the Houses of the Oireachtas (Parliament of Ireland) in a range of policy, strategy development and political communication roles.

Ms. Kavanagh is originally from Galmoy, Co. Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland. She holds a Barrister-at-Law Degree (2012) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Studies (2010) from the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, Dublin. She also holds Masters Degrees in Political Communication (Dublin City University, 2017) and Politics (University College Dublin, 2021) and a BA Degree in History and Politics (University College Dublin 2000).

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Books & Books