Henry Henry

By: Allen Bratton

Narrated by: Sebastian Humphreys

Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's 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.

©2024 Allen Bratton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'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 – that draws out the complicated violence of obligation and devotion, and engages unsentimentally with the metamorphic power of love. You will come away from this book changed.' (Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time)

'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)