And then the night when my life began again A strange beginning. Soldiers, bright lights. The cold. And me being lifted, as if by surgeons, into a new world It is winter, somewhere in the United Kingdom, and an eight year-old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He soon learns that he is the victim of an extraordinary political experiment. A vision, a fable, a satire, a love story, a ghost story, Divided Kingdom is a remarkable, genre-defying novel and it confirms Rupert Thomson as that rare thing - a writer of sublime prose who also has a mesmerising tale to tell.