Henry Henry

* 2025 Lammy Award Finalist* 'The best modern re-telling of Shakespeare since She's The Man ' Jack Edwards, Esquire 'Very funny... Its deeply felt pages flew by' GUARDIAN 'Sexy, compassionate, uncommonly imaginative: I've never read anything quite like it' Oisín 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. 'Deeply enjoyable' Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea 'Thrillingly imaginative' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time 'One of the most exciting new novels' FINANCIAL TIMES

* 2025 Lammy Award Finalist* 'The best modern re-telling of Shakespeare since She's The Man ' Jack Edwards, Esquire 'Very funny... Its deeply felt pages flew by' GUARDIAN 'Sexy, compassionate, uncommonly imaginative: I've never read anything quite like it' Oisín 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. 'Deeply enjoyable' Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea 'Thrillingly imaginative' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time 'One of the most exciting new novels' FINANCIAL TIMES

"Bratton's electric debut novel transforms Shakespeare into a modern, queer drama that's as bawdy as it's sharp." --THE NEW YORK TIMES LAUGH NOW. CRY LATER. It's London, 2014, and Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, is in a holding pattern: his mother is dead, his father is dying or remarrying or both, his siblings are fighting, his internship is pointless, and nobody will leave him alone. Everything is as it should be, in other words, and yet nothing is right. Over the course of a year of partying, drinking, and flirting to dubious consequence, Hal is tested by brutal family legacies, Catholic guilt, and the terrifying possibility of being loved. All of which is complicated by a pattern of abuse that threatens to chase Hal into adulthood. The House of Lancaster will never be the same. Crackling with intelligence and wit, Allen Bratton arrives as a successor to Waugh and St. Aubyn with this lush, stylish novel of family, legacy, and what it means to be alive today.

"Bratton's electric debut novel transforms Shakespeare into a modern, queer drama that's as bawdy as it's sharp." --THE NEW YORK TIMES LAUGH NOW. CRY LATER. It's London, 2014, and Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, is in a holding pattern: his mother is dead, his father is dying or remarrying or both, his siblings are fighting, his internship is pointless, and nobody will leave him alone. Everything is as it should be, in other words, and yet nothing is right. Over the course of a year of partying, drinking, and flirting to dubious consequence, Hal is tested by brutal family legacies, Catholic guilt, and the terrifying possibility of being loved. All of which is complicated by a pattern of abuse that threatens to chase Hal into adulthood. The House of Lancaster will never be the same. Crackling with intelligence and wit, Allen Bratton arrives as a successor to Waugh and St. Aubyn with this lush, stylish novel of family, legacy, and what it means to be alive today.