Albion

(Paperback)

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Description

Albion shakes the country house novel to its foundations, in a story of family, inheritance and accountability The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home - twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone - to bury Philip- husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature- a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they've built their lives.

Reviews

A superb novel deftly woven around themes of class, national identity and environmental collapse. In Albion Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama * Jonathan Coe, author of Middle England *
Anna Hopes beautiful new novel Albion explores the complexities of family, trauma, nature, human nature, landscape and escape in language that is as provocative as it is tender * Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace *
The English country house novel re-imagined for our times: an exceptionally well-drawn portrait of a battling family, which also astutely wrestles with the issues around rewilding, inheritance, and colonialism * Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground *
A book that asks important questions about legacy - familial, historical and global - and which seeks to answer them with delicate insight and beautiful prose * Elizabeth Day *
This book, its fascinating characters, steady paced plot and haunting prose will stay with you long after reading * Cosmopolitan, The 25 books we cant wait to read in 2025 *
Anna Hope plunges us straight into the claustrophobic world of a family turned inside out by the death of the deeply flawed patriarch, and propels us towards a devastating conclusion. Compelling * Kirsty Wark *
A compassionate, immersive novel that intelligently navigates historical pride and guilt, and the echo of history that resonates powerfully through the lives of Anna Hopes compelling contemporary characters. Albion balances the reality of who the English were against the hope of who we might become * Richard Beard, author of The Day That Went Missing *
It was around halfway through the first paragraph of Albion that I knew I had fallen in love with this book ... Anna Hope writes hauntingly beautiful poetic prose, and draws you deep into the heart of this family, their pain, joy, and love of the land they inhabit ... The book explores important, topical themes of today - nature, land and land ownership, climate change, class, and a contemporary reframing of colonial history - in a rich, layered, yet accessible way. I was inspired in particular by the way Anna Hope writes about human relationships with the natural world - as observer, actor, perpetrator, saviour, friend and foe ... This is a novel I will return to again and again * Louisa Adjoa Parker *
There are shades of both Succession and Saltburn at play here, with Albion promising more of the emotional acuity that Anna Hope wielded so well in 2019s Expectation * Independent The best books to look out for in 2025 *
One of our most gifted contemporary writers * Waterstones, praise for Expectation *

Author Bio

ANNA HOPE is the internationally prizewinning and bestselling author of Wake, The Ballroom, Expectation and The White Rock. She studied at Oxford University and RADA and her novels have been translated into over 20 languages. Expectation is currently being adapted for the screen by Clemence Poesy and Haut et Court films in Paris. She lives in Sussex with her family.