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Henry Henry

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

They knew each other because their families knew each other: had known each other, for a long time.

An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent

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 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.

'Wonderful' BRANDON TAYLOR, author of The Late Americans

'A brilliantly glinting and twisted debut' SEÁN HEWITT, author of All Down Darkness Wide

'Carnal and precise' RAVEN LEILANI, author of Luster

©2024 Allen Bratton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • 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

  • 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

  • The year’s finest debut. It has the power to reinvigorate literature with the type of daring prose that is becoming much too rare. So good I couldn’t put it down

    Jeremy O. Harris, author of Slave Play

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