“Hamnet” Novelist Maggie O’Farrell Shares New Novel

St. Louis County Library Foundation’s Favorite Author Series and The Novel Neighbor present award-winning and bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell for a discussion and signing of her latest novel “Land.”

The event will take place on Monday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m. at the Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63131. 

TICKET INFORMATION: Tickets can be purchased through Eventbrite.

INDIVIDUAL TICKET $38 (Admits ONE and includes one copy of “Land”)

PACKAGE TICKET $48 (Admits TWO and includes one copy of “Land”)

Due to a shoulder injury, the author is unable to sign books. Books purchased with tickets will include a custom stamp.

The award-winning, bestselling author of “Hamnet” and “The Marriage Portrait” returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. 

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 the lives of 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 Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include “Hamnet” (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), “The Hand That First Held Mine” (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and “The Marriage Portrait.” She has also written a memoir, “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.” 

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.