Henry Henry

Allen Bratton

"One of the most exciting new novels" Financial Times

"Hilariously funny... its deeply moving pages fly by." The Guardian

“Exciting, compassionate, and extraordinarily imaginative: I’ve never read anything like it before.” Oisin McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

London, 2014. Hal Lancaster—twenty-two, gay, Catholic, cocaine-slashing with a MyWaitrose card—is the reluctant heir to his father, Henry, the 16th Duke of Lancaster. Half tyrant, half martyr, Henry's passion for his eldest son has turned into an obsession. While Hal juggles training and drinking sessions, Henry keeps him in check with passive aggression, religious guilt, and a cruelty that Hal sometimes mixes with tenderness. When a grouse shooting—a laughable aside—turns Hal's rivalry with the family's bumbling leftist friend Harry Percy into romance, Hal discovers that, for the first time, he wants a life of his own. But his father, Henry, is English: he won't let his son abandon tradition. To save himself, Hal must grapple not only with grief and shame but also with the wounds of his family's past.

"Very enjoyable" Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea

"Excitingly imaginative" - ​​Callian Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time