Henry Henry

Author Allen Bratton
Narrator Sebastian Humphreys
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 2 May 2024
Run Time 11 hours and 37 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Contemporary romance, Fiction: pastiche, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Coming of age.

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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

Seu00e1n Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

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