In Bingen House, guarded by shale-white Ulster mountains, and on the edge of the Atlantic, lived Captain Conway Chesney: small, neat, efficient, and a diabolical domestic tyrant. Owen Rodgers, son of the local doctor, came one day to look at the sheepdog trials on the green before Bingen House. There in the early morning he peered down from a stable loft into the farmyard and discovered the evil secret of Bingen, and was possessed by it. Originally published in 1960, Kiely's tour-de-force treatment of love and disappointment is as famous for it's blend of mythology and lyrical warmth, as it is for the vivid characterisation of the brooding, malevolent Captain and his sad-eyed daughter Greta.