Elmet

Daniel is traveling north in search of someone, and his thoughts keep returning to the life he left behind. He grew up with his father, known as Daddy, and his sister Cathy in a home Daddy built himself, far from town. They lived off the land, foraging and hunting, and though the two children went to school for a time, they never quite fit in with other kids and drifted further apart from them over time. Daddy would vanish for stretches and come back wild-eyed, yet at home he seemed calm. He insisted that the small wood in Elmet belonged only to them.

That claim was not secure. Greedy, watchful men in the area began to close in on the family's land, and Daddy's capacity for violence grew alongside the pressure. The novel moves between the siblings' childhood and the fraught present, tracing how their precarious position has come to feel both fragile and dangerous.

Set in Yorkshire, the book is a quiet, unsettling portrait of a family living on the margins of a changing society. It considers how far the bond between a father and his children can stretch, and what it costs them.