Albion: A Novel

Summary

“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 story of family, 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—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 of English countryside, 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 dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.