Henry Henry

By (author) Bratton, Allen
Description:

*2025 Lammy Award Finalist*

''The best modern re-telling of Shakespeare since She''s The Man'' Jack Edwards, Esquire

''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

''One of the most exciting new novels'' FINANCIAL TIMES

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One of the most exciting new novels I’ve read in the past couple of months
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Darkly humorous
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Dark and gripping… I couldn’t put it down
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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
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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
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Wonderful... This book needs to be read right now by as many people as possible
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Carnal and precise, a challenging taxonomy of familial and personal failure that Bratton renders without tidiness or judgment
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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
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Bratton executes the project sharply, with humour and poignancy… He can really write
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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
Biographical note:
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, shortlisted for the 2025 Lammy Awards, is his debut novel.