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Henry Henry

Henry Henry

Summary

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

Reviews

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

About the author

Allen Bratton

Allen Bratton was born in the United States. He holds an MA in English Language and Literatures, having written a thesis on medieval English kingship. He is the winner of the 2021 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and was longlisted for the 2021 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. Henry Henry is his debut novel.
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