Maggie O'Farrell, the Women's Prize-winning author of Hamnet, returns in 2026 with a sweeping multigenerational epic set in 1865 Ireland, a country still reeling from the Great Hunger.
Mapping a wounded country
The novel follows Tomás and his ten-year-old son Liam as they work for the Ordnance Survey, traveling across an Ireland devastated by famine to chart its towns, fields and ruins. The act of mapping becomes a powerful metaphor: an attempt to impose order and record on a landscape and a people who have endured catastrophic loss.
O'Farrell, celebrated for her ability to bring history to vivid, sensory life, turns the surveyors' journey into an intimate portrait of grief, resilience and the bond between a father and his child.
What sets it apart
- Historical depth: A rarely dramatized chapter of post-famine Irish history.
- Intimate scale: A vast national story told through one family's eyes.
- Signature prose: O'Farrell's lush, precise language brings the period alive.
Following the success of 'Hamnet'
Hamnet made O'Farrell one of the most acclaimed historical novelists working today, and expectations for this follow-up are enormous. Where that book reimagined Shakespeare's family, the new novel turns to her native Ireland and one of the most traumatic events in its history.
Why the famine setting matters
The Great Hunger remains a defining wound in Irish memory, and fiction that engages it carries real weight. By focusing on the years just after the worst of the famine, O'Farrell explores how a society begins, haltingly, to rebuild and remember.
For readers who loved Hamnet or who seek immersive, emotionally rich historical fiction, O'Farrell's 2026 epic is shaping up to be one of the year's most anticipated literary events, a story of mapping, mourning and the will to carry on.