Albion
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Albion explores the complexities of family, trauma, nature, human nature, landscape and escape in language that is as provocative as it is tender.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace
A finely crafted, propulsive, and nuanced family saga of inheritance and accountability that shakes the country house novel to its foundations from the internationally acclaimed author of Expectation.
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone in the English countryside—to bury Philip: husband, father, and the blinding sun around which they have orbited their entire lives.
Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other.
Isa, Philip’s estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage.
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope’s multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary examination of family secrets, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An English family's history is laid bare after their patriarch's death in this knotty drama from Hope (The White Rock). Frannie Brooke has inherited her father Philip's thousand-acre Sussex estate. For the past decade, she has devoted herself to rewilding the land, which has been in the family since the late 18th century, to help slow climate change. She spars with her younger brother, Milo, over the land's future, as he believes Philip, who once staged a music festival on the property, would approve of his plan to build a psychedelic-based wellness center for the ultrarich. Then their younger sister, Isa, drops the bombshell that she's invited Clara, daughter of their father's longtime American mistress, to the funeral, claiming that Clara might be their half sister. As the Brookes brace for Clara's arrival, Frannie is shaken by an estimate of the steep inheritance tax. When Clara arrives and shares something unexpected about the family's history, the Brooke siblings slip into a tailspin. Hope wrangles her large cast with aplomb as she probes issues of class and stewardship. This gratifies.
