Allen Bratton

One of the most exciting new novels I’ve read in the past couple of months

Dark and gripping… I couldn’t put it down

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

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

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

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

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

Bratton’s prose assumes a directness that avoids sensationalism with as much skill as it steers clear of moralism and sentimentalism

Hero, *Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2024*

Bratton writes about this rarefied milieu with a mix of fascination and dismay. There’s satire here, much of it subtle and some of it very funny.. Its deeply felt pages fly by

Allen Bratton observes social and emotional detail with a shocking, thrilling level of precision and wisdom. This book bounds between the surreal and the heartrending, telling a story which is beautiful and desolate and wildly funny all at once. It's sexy, compassionate, uncommonly imaginative: I've never read anything quite like it.

Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

Henry Henry is a novel of sharp and uncompromising insight, told with wit and incredible empathy. I found it moving, often unsparing, and always deeply enjoyable - all the things a novel should be

This novel sent me into such a frenzy that I started recommending it to people before I’d even finished it

If you know the originals, you’ll be enchanted by this clever adaptation. If you don’t, your enjoyment won’t be dampened at all, for the story Bratton tells is full of humour and poignancy, and his characters feel real and very much alive

The best modern re-telling of Shakespeare since She’s The Man

*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 
 
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. 
 
'Deeply enjoyable' Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea 
 
'Thrillingly imaginative' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

Allen Bratton

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