Description

‘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’ Oisin 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.

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.

Publisher Review

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 — Sean 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* *