Henry Henry
Allen Bratton
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Recommended by Gayle
‘Two things I’m largely against: 1) endless retellings of Shakespeare plays, and 2) being made to care deeply about coked-up aristocrats, but in both cases, I have been forced to make an exception for Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry. A retelling of the Henriad that brings Prince Hal, Henry, Falstaff et al to 21st century London; it’s very funny, until it’s suddenly completely devastating. Worth breaking your own rules for!’
From the publisher
An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent
'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