Henry Henry Audiobook By Allen Bratton cover art

Henry Henry

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Henry Henry

By: Allen Bratton
Narrated by: Sebastian Humphreys
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About this listen

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 Coming of Age Genre Fiction Humorous Literature & Fiction Romance Funny

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)
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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.

A masterful performance of a challenging book

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