Henry Henry
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3 months free
Henry Henry
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Narrated by:
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Sebastian Humphreys
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By:
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Allen Bratton
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.
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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)
Unsure
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A Fascinating Story
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I didn't know much about this book going in. The book is called "enjoyable" and "funny" by other authors on its cover which gives completely the wrong impression. It's actually a harrowing and deeply sad novel. I wasn't prepared for the themes of incest and child abuse going in but they were handled in a raw, visceral and deeply tragic way. Henry is such a despicable and evil man and you really feel for Hal: broken, ashamed, unable to speak up. The depiction of such abuse and its affects was authentic and heart-wrenching.
The only thing I didn't love about the book was the ending, in which Richard suddenly became paramount and lots of family history was relayed. I found this a bit dull and I thought the ending could have been better if it focused more on Hal and Percy, but the author seemed to want more realism over a neat or dramatic ending, which I respect.
The discomfort and the toxicity lasted right until the end, with neither Philipa or Hal quite granted relief.
A poignant novel that deserves to be far more popular.
Like A Little Life meets Saltburn
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