Overview

An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent Meet Hal- twenty-two, gay, Catholic, chops lines of cocaine with his myWaitrose card - and reluctant heir to the noble House of Lancaster 'Fun... Bratton has a sharp eye' TELEGRAPH Hal's father Henry, the sixteenth Duke of Lancaster, is half tyrant, half martyr. His investment in his eldest son 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. Elegant and blisteringly funny, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of Shakespeare's history plays for the modern era - for fans of Alan Hollinghurst, Evelyn Waugh and Saltburn. 'Carnal and precise' RAVEN LEILANI 'You will come away from this book changed' KALIANE BRADLEY 'A brilliantly glinting and twisted debut' SE N HEWITT

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9781787334595

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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 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

Wonderful... This book needs to be read right now by as many people as possible -- Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans 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 * Telegraph * 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. 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 The year’s finest debut. It has the power to reinvigorate literature with the type of daring prose that is becoming much too rare. So good I couldn’t put it down -- Jeremy O. Harris, author of Slave Play Comic and biting * Hero Magazine, *Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2024* *

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

Author Information

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 is his debut novel.

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