A Kingdom

After an elderly farmer dies, following an accident on a remote Welsh smallholding, he leaves the kingdom over which he had ruled so fiercely to his two daughters, Lucy and Cadi. As they prepare for the funeral, the novel—the last written by the prolific James Hanley—relates the events and experiences that made each sister what she is now: Lucy, the runaway, who fled the farm secretly and without warning, never to see the old man again, and Cadi, who promptly sacrificed her job as a teacher in Manchester to take Lucy’s place in her father’s lonely world, thus initiating a pattern of guilt, self-submission, self-reliance, and occluded rage that would last until his death. A haunting, elegiac evocation of hill-farm life, A Kingdom focuses on the connotations of the word “rooted” from its first line, exploring what it means, for good and ill, to be tied to such a place.