* 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
