Maggie O’Farrell

speaker

1,785 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 14 Jun

Maggie O’Farrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.

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The Book Show · How Maggie O'Farrell's inner 'neek' came out with Land · 14 Jun 2026 podcast

And I think toponomy, which is the study of...

uh place names and why they're called the what they are is so fascinating because you can always see you can often find something in there you can see some kind of explanation as to why it's called and it's history you know names are not casual they're always they're always very important and very significant so that's exciting i look forward to hearing more about that

Oh, that's a big question.

So it starts, like you said, in 1865 with a father and son mapping team on a peninsula in the west of Ireland.

And it's there that Thomas has an unusual encounter in the copse.

And then, so partly the book on one level is a story about a family who are trying to emerge from the long shadow of the Great Hunger.

But also, I decided, perhaps foolishly, Clare, to tell the whole story of Ireland via this one peninsula, going right back to the very first people that ever lived upon it.

I hope this isn't going to put people off, but it goes right back to the Bronze Age Ireland.

to the second wave of people who ever lived there and a girl called Brith who lives in a hill fort very near where Tomas and Liam will, millennia later, be mapping the mountains.

It was just something that I really, really wanted to do to examine the whole, you know, the sort of permanence of land versus the impermanence of human life and how we are really just a blink in the eye of the

vast timescape of a landscape.

It was, I did really enjoy it and I was looking forward to it and I knew that I was coming up to that part of the book, but I was anxious.

because I kept imagining my editor's face.

Now, I've had the same editor for 27 years, 76 years, so we know each other very well.

And I was just worried when I handed it in to her, I was worried I would get the manuscript back and just in the margin would be basically a WTF.

Can I say that on air?

It sounds really wrong, but you know what I mean.

Luckily, no, she didn't say that.

She liked it.

But I did think I was worried that she would just send it back to me and say, what?

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