In The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends—the winner of the 2025 BookLife Fiction Prize, a yearly competition for self-published authors—readers meet April Smart. The heroine of L.K. Quinn’s debut novel, chosen from the general fiction category of the prize, is as wondrous and resilient as a 10-year-old girl can be, and thank goodness, because she is surrounded by damaged, unreliable adults. She also has the gift of being able to find joy in the mundane, such as in this passage: “I sat back and looked across the garden and over the rooves down the hill into the valley. The outlines are sharp under the sun. The light slips between them like vanilla custard on chocolate crunch at school.”
Quinn wastes no time plunging the reader into April’s world, from the humble to the horrific. Additional characters include April’s harried, mentally ill mother; her treacherous stepfather; her rambunctious brothers; and the lonely and enigmatic Toffee Man, a friend who offers kindness, refuge, and, of course, lustrous toffees. April is charged with too much too soon—she labors under society’s (and her family’s) continual insistence that she always be good, helpful, and nice, while those who should keep her safe repeatedly betray her in the worst ways.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl, who selected the book as a finalist, extolled The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends as “a book about childhood and longing, belief and loss, and the lies adults tell to imprison truth. Here we experience the making of a self in a world that refuses to allow girls to draw their own maps—all the intimacy and craving, the openness and heartbreak.” The BookLife Prize critic’s report for The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends praised Quinn’s ability to convey a childlike perspective without sacrificing sublety or dimension. “Quinn creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, with an overriding sense of catastrophe brewing throughout,” the reviewer wrote. “The novel’s power lies in Quinn’s ability to vividly sketch the all-too-common struggles of this world: poverty, abuse, marginalization, and a desperate search to carve meaning out of a life of suffering.”
April Smart first came to the author in a dream. “I dreamt of a young girl watching an old man in a garden and asking questions. When I was a child, there was an old man we called the Toffee Man who lived in our village. I barely knew him, but I thought about him a lot because people were very unkind about him, though he had the kindest eyes. I wished I had talked to him. I think that’s where April began.”
As with any character, however, April grew from an amalgam of personal experiences and interactions. When Quinn first began writing, she recalled a friend who died from a brain tumor when they were both in their early teens. “She was a very wise and emotionally intelligent person, and she was in what I later understood as ‘a state of grace.’ That experience sat with me, not least because we’d had what was termed a disadvantaged life,” Quinn says. “When I started to write the story I was aiming for epic tragedy, with that state of grace as the flaw that made way for betrayal to express itself in a small life for which the world had little regard.”
Because she’s so young, the reader often has a better understanding of what April is enduring than she does. When asked about striking that balance, the author explained: “Once I found the story, I focused on April’s sensory impressions, using language that was right for a 10-year-old, making sure that she was making connections and using references relative to her life experience.” Quinn explains that she did some research into some of the technical aspects of language acquisition, though April’s voice is so distinctive and full of acute emotion, readers will be hard-pressed to remember another character quite like her.
“I thought if the reader could feel what she felt, it would keep them ahead,” Quinn says. “I didn’t set out to construct a heroine so much as listen for one—the voice of someone caught between conscience and desire, between wanting to be good and wanting to follow the needs of a heart hungry for connection, for love.”
April’s understandable hunger makes her easy prey for her manipulative stepfather. When asked about some of the book’s more difficult passages, Quinn explains: “Early on, I made the decision to make it clear who the abuser was and how the abuse could work without her mother, Hope, knowing. That really helped me to focus on April’s voice, as I didn’t have to think about building to the reveal. It was April’s choice.” Quinn notes that the technology and forensics available today were not available when the book is set: “It was a time when surveillance depended on neighbors and relationships were face-to-face... women and children still had few rights, and poverty was a personal failure.”
The novel also integrates philosophy, particularly Kantian, as it raises questions about self-interest, desire, and moral duty. Kant’s ideas helped to shape the story’s moral conflicts, and they inspired the title. “His concept of the Kingdom of Ends—a world where every being must be treated as an end in itself, and not a means to an end—became implicit in the narrative,” Quinn says. “Kant saw that our senses and our minds serve survival, not truth. We instinctively choose to see the world in a way that enhances our survival. As we reflect and understand the implications of our choices, we can do better.”
April’s fascination with space is another significant thematic element. While April is in many ways trapped in her circumstances, contemplating space travel serves as a source of escape and solace. Quinn says, “I was a young child in 1968, when space was more than a frontier—it was a promise. For us children, that sense of expansion was intoxicating. It said that imagination could be real. It was only as an adult that I understood the world was divided by politics and fear, yet above it all was this silent, shining possibility. The space age baked into my very being that I should dream, go boldly, and if only in my mind, that anything was possible.”
As she was writing, Quinn thought back to the night of the moon landings, when she sat on the roof of her house: “I’d heard on the radio they had landed and thought somehow I could see it if I were closer.”
Like April, Quinn grew up in a caravan in West Country fields, eventually becoming a ward of the state, and has been enchanted by the written word since she was a child. She’s worked in the music industry, as an actress, and has written scripts. When it came to writing The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends, the author says with April’s charming frankness that she just needed to write, so she did.
Regarding her BookLife Prize win, Quinn says that, in addition to affirming her remarkable storytelling abilities, “This has had the benefit of buying me [my husband’s] appreciation whilst I sit and write the sequel.”
MaryJanice Davidson is a bestselling author who lives in St. Paul, Minn., with her family. Her newest release is The Reluctant Reaper.
