Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms is a twisty, genre-bending ride

Natasha Pulley’s latest novel The Kingdoms is the sort of story that’s difficult to classify. Part historical saga, part speculative reimagining with a hefty dose of time travel thrown in, this novel is both a time-bending romance and a search for identity across multiple decades and futures.

Its premise can, at points, be difficult to explain and confusing to follow yet, the overall arc of its story is so fascinating to watch play out, you’ll stick through it all the way to the (surprisingly emotional) end. A story that’s unafraid to deal with the darker aspects of time travel – the lives  erased and futures upended by meddling in the past – even as it embraces the bizarre found family created by people from two different times, this is a novel that will stick with you long after you’ve finished it, even if you’re not entirely sure how you feel about it in the end.

The Kingdoms, in its most basic sense, is the story of a man named Joe Tournier, who arrives in the city of Londres in the French colony of England in 1898, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He doesn’t remember his master – like most English people in Napoleon IV’s Europe, Joe is enslaved – or the wife he’s apparently married to. (In fact, for some reason he thinks his wife is named Madeline, even though that is also a woman he can’t really remember.)

When a postcard arrives bearing a postmark from 90 years earlier and the image of a lighthouse that’s only recently been constructed, Joe becomes obsessed with finding out what happened in that time he can’t remember, and trying to figure who the mysterious M who signed the card is.  This search eventually takes him to the Outer Hebrides – where more than just the lighthouse is waiting for him. A time portal will take him back to the past, where his very presence could – or maybe already has – change the future.

The Kingdoms is complicated and doesn’t offer easy answers

The Kingdoms essentially features multiple stories unfolding at once, each set a hundred or so years apart from the other, where one England is a subject of France and the other is still fighting the Napoleonic Wars. The consequences of time travel – enemies having access to technology that they shouldn’t, discovering outcomes from events like the Battle of Trafalgar and Waterloo before they happen – loom large over Joe’s actions, as we see the fallout from seemingly small, desperate decisions literally reshape the world.

As Joe finds himself shuffled between two timelines, he must ask himself difficult questions about what he’s willing to sacrifice in the name of a better world – the future he’s built for himself in the present he can barely understand, complete with a daughter he adores, or the past where he apparently once built a life he no longer remembers, but can still sometimes feel the emotional weight of.

The story is rich and layered but can feel ploddingly slow at times, and The Kingdoms is interested in asking questions a lot more than it is answering them. Sure, the mystery of Joe’s past and how it intersects with a ship called The Kingdom and a nineteenth-century sailor named Missouri Kite is ultimately explained, in fact, you’ll probably figure it all out well before Joe himself does.

But the wider implications of the novel’s ending – the logic of Joe’s choices, the family he creates and those he leaves behind, the questionable decisions that Kite makes in the name of keeping secrets both from and about Joe which include actual cold-blooded murder – revolve around thorny moral questions that the novel generally leaves up to the reader to pick apart.

In some ways, that’s a good thing – I love an author who trusts her audience to keep up and fill in the narrative gaps themselves when they need to. But, on the other hand, it means you’re left feeling a bit unfulfilled by an ending that seems as though it’s a happy one but required so much unacknowledged sacrifice to achieve.

The Kingdoms is available now. Let us know if you’re planning to give it a look!