Henry Henry

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

London, 2014. Hal Lancaster – twenty-two, gay, Catholic, chops lines of cocaine with his myWaitrose card – is the reluctant heir of his father Henry, the sixteenth Duke of Lancaster. Henry is half tyrant, half martyr, with an investment in his eldest son that has grown into an obsession. While Hal floats between internships and drinking sessions, Henry keeps him in check with passive-aggression, religious guilt, and a cruelty that Hal sometimes confuses for tenderness.

When a grouse shooting accident – funny in retrospect – makes a romance out of Hal’s rivalry with fumblingly leftist family friend Harry Percy, Hal finds that he wants, for the first time, a life of his own. But his father Henry is an Englishman: he will not let his son escape tradition. To save himself, Hal must reckon not only with grief and shame but with the wounds of his family's past.

*2025 Lammy Award Finalist*

'One of the most exciting new novels' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Very funny... Its deeply felt pages flew by' GUARDIAN

'Sexy, compassionate, uncommonly imaginative: I've never read anything quite like it' Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

'Deeply enjoyable' Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea

'Thrillingly imaginative' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

©2024 Allen Bratton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

One of the most exciting new novels I’ve read in the past couple of months
Financial Times
Darkly humorous
Stylist
Dark and gripping… I couldn’t put it down
Daily Mail
With this reimagining, Bratton has created a marvelously detailed world of supernumerary aristocrats, as rich, toxic and wild as the best entries in the the Real Housewives franchise
New York Times
Fun... Bratton has a sharp eye for the absurdities of the white-saviour ex-public-schoolboy. And there’s a keen sense of the aching fugue of one’s early twenties
Telegraph
Wonderful... This book needs to be read right now by as many people as possible
Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Carnal and precise, a challenging taxonomy of familial and personal failure that Bratton renders without tidiness or judgment
Raven Leilani, author of Luster
I tore through Henry Henry in two days. A thrillingly imaginative new vision for Shakespeare’s Henriad – witty in its narrative parallels and deliciously realist in its resetting. You will come away from this book changed
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
Bratton executes the project sharply, with humour and poignancy… He can really write
Prospect
Irreverent, immersive, scathingly funny, with a deep emotional undercurrent that pulls you out unexpectedly into heart-wrenching territory. Henry Henry is a brilliantly glinting and twisted debut
Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

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