Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Henry Henry

By: Allen Bratton
Narrated by: Sebastian Humphreys
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.33

Buy for $20.33

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

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.

©2024 Allen Bratton (P)2024 Penguin Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: LGBTQ+
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

'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)

'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)

What listeners say about Henry Henry

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A masterful performance of a challenging book

Actor Sebastian Humphreys brings subtlety, mastery and brilliant characterisation to Alan Bratton's unflinching and demanding study of an intelligent young man trying to unravel his own story of love, inheritance, religion, sex and abuse through the sometimes blurred,sometimes actutely clear lens of addiction. At times blatant, at times delicate references to Shakespeare's Henriad are deftly woven into the fabric of this book, and these can leave those in the literary know frustrated and unfulfilled, which is precisely what our leading man Hal is feeling. Binding us to the book. Addiction and abuse are cyclical, and at times the repetition can be overwhelming, but Bratton and Humphreys bring us from distaste for our hero to compassion and a meaningful conclusion, beautifully. Historians of the future will enjoy the wonderful references to 201415 life and attitudes in London. A satisfying, if emotionally challenging, listen.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!