A Kingdom — James Hanley

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.