Albion
The new novel from the bestselling author of Expectation
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF EXPECTATION
'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 – at the heart of a thousand acres of English countryside – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.
They must grapple with their shared grief as well as their shared inheritance. Each of his children is adamant that their father has given them his blessing, and none are willing to back down, as dreams of rewilding the English countryside clash with a vision of a psychedelic haven for the super-rich.
But as they debate the future of the land, a stranger arrives 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.
