Wednesday 10th of July
6.30 - 9pm
Join us to celebrate the launch of Henry, Henry by Allen Bratton.
Bratton will be in conversation with Barry Pierce to discuss his new work.
They knew each other because their families knew each other: had
known each other, for a long time
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.
‘I tore through Henry Henry in two days. A thrillingly imaginative new vision for Shakespeare’s
Henriad – witty in its narrative parallels and deliciously realist in its resetting. You will come
away from this book changed’
-Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
Allen Bratton was born in the US. He holds an MA in English Language and
Literatures, having written a thesis on medieval English kingship. He is the
winner of the 2021 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and was longlisted for
the 2021 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. Henry Henry is his
debut novel.
Barry Pierce is a books and culture writer based in London. He has been a book critic for the Irish Times, Sunday Times and the Big Issue and his cultural criticism has appeared in Dazed, i-D, British GQ and HERO Magazine.