'One of the most exciting new novels' FINANCIAL TIMES '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.
Elegant and blisteringly funny Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of Shakespeare's history
plays for the modern era - for fans of Alan Hollinghurst Evelyn Waugh and Saltburn .
