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Between death and emigration, Ireland lost almost a quarter of its population in the mid 1800s to the 

. Entire villages starved to death after potato blight wiped out the island’s primary subsistence crop, and British overseers did little to help. 

” author Maggie O’Farrell’s ancestors lived that history and stayed in Ireland. According to family lore, her great-great-grandfather was a map-maker who helped the British redraw maps of the island after the famine altered the land. 

Inspired by that story, O’Farrell decided her next novel would be centered on her homeland of Ireland and the tragic era that marked both the place and her people. 

“I think it’s hard for us,” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “These days, we can look at the statistics [of death and people leaving]. But if you zero down to one or two people’s tiny little lives, you see the enormity of tragedy behind it.”

,” tells the story of two such people, Tomás and his wife, Phina, who survive the Great Hunger and have four children. It’s a universal story told through the specifics of one family and one piece of land. She talks about it — and her work on the Oscar-winning adaptation of her novel, “Hamnet,” — on this weeks Big Books and Bold Ideas. 

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The author of “Hamnet” returns to historical fiction for her new novel, but this time, the story was inspired by her own Irish ancestors. 

Maggie O'Farrell pulls from the mythology of her own family for 'Land'

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