Henry Henry

(Hardback)

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Elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny, Henry Henry is a compelling portrait of privilege, inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new literary talent. They knew each other because their families knew each other- had known each other, for a long time Elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny, Henry Henry is a compelling portrait of privilege, inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new literary 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 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.

Reviews

Wonderful... This book needs to be read right now by as many people as possible -- Brandon Taylor * Esquire *
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 Shakespeares 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

Author Bio

Allen Bratton was born in the US. 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.