An elderly farmer dies, following an accident on a remote mid-Wales smallholding, leaving the kingdom he had ruled over so fiercely to his two daughters, Lucy and Cadi. As they prepare for the funeral, the novel charts the courses whereby each sister came to be what she now is; Lucy, the one that got away, fleeing the farm secretly and without warning, never to see the old man again, and Cadi, who promptly gave up her job as a teacher in Manchester to take Lucy's place in her father's lonely, narrow world, beginning 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, from its very first line A Kingdom is preoccupied with the connotations surrounding the word rooted and with what it means, for good and ill, to be tied to such a place.