Albion
From the bestselling author of Expectation
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE AUTHOR OF EXPECTATION
AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4
'Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma' The Times
'Superb … Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama' Jonathan Coe
‘Beautiful . . . As provocative as it is tender’ Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.
Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. 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 has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out 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.
‘The English country house novel reimagined for our times ... Exceptionally well-drawn’ Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
‘A book that asks important questions about legacy – familial, historical and global – and which seeks to answer them with delicate insight and beautiful prose’ Elizabeth Day
‘Hauntingly beautiful . . . This is a novel I will return to again and again’ Louisa Adjoa Parker
‘Albion balances the reality of who the English were against the hope of who we might become’ Richard Beard, author of The Day That Went Missing
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.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
I was impressed by the way the author uses language , in some ways it was a literary book.
However the continued use of the present tense as narrative was annoying and the characters were poorly drawn.
Three stars is generous .