Henry Henry
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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)
What listeners say about Henry Henry
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- jackjustreading
- 23-06-24
Unsure
The writing is excellent. Having just finished the audio I don’t know what to think. I wanted it to be longer. Perhaps some resolution? I can’t fault the writing. The plot was fine. Certain elements made for uncomfortable reading.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Stephen Bentley
- 18-05-24
A Fascinating Story
I am not a person of colour. This is a fascinating story - horrible - at the same time. I wonder if the author is/was the best person to have been chosen to read the work? For me the reading was too much on one note so I found it difficult to hear/listen to what was being read. It is a story well worth telling and hearing. I have given it repeat hearings - had to because I found it too easy to glide over - I am pleased to have given the story repeat hearings nonetheless - well worth the time. I'm not sure if the obvious references to Henry IV parts 1 and 2 were a hindrance or a help to my understanding what was going on.
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