An elegant, audacious and blisteringly funny portrait of inheritance, defiance and love - from a major new talent
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
'Carnal and precise' RAVEN LEILANI, author of Luster
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.
'Wonderful' BRANDON TAYLOR, author of The Late Americans
'A brilliantly glinting and twisted debut' SE N HEWITT, author of All Down Darkness Wide
About the Author
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.
Industry Reviews
Wonderful... This book needs to be read right now by as many people as possible -- Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Carnal and precise, a challenging taxonomy of familial and personal failure that Bratton renders without tidiness or judgment -- Raven Leilani, author of Luster
Not only is Henry Henry one of the first books of the year that has inspired an audible gasp, it's also 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
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 -- Sean Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
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
Allen Bratton's Henry Henry brilliantly highlights the tension between history and modernity, power and freedom, and fathers and sons. A darkly humorous examination of the weight of privilege packed with drugs, dicks, Catholicism, cigarettes, and, yes, love - Henry Henry is a sharply-written party you don't want to miss -- Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag Massachusetts
Comic and biting * Hero Magazine, *Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2024* *
