Albion
Anna Hope
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 – 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
Product Details
About Anna Hope
Reviews for Albion
Sunday Times
At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel
The i, best books out in May
Albion is exquisitely put together, with a tight structure and richly drawn characters
Literary Review
There are shades of both Succession and Saltburn at play here, with Albion promising more of the emotional acuity that Anna Hope wielded so well in 2019’s Expectation
Independent – The best books to look out for in 2025
A superb novel deftly woven around themes of class, national identity and environmental collapse. In Albion 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, author of Middle England
Anna Hope’s beautiful new novel 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, author of The Paper Palace
The English country house novel re-imagined for our times: an exceptionally well-drawn portrait of a battling family, which also astutely wrestles with the issues around rewilding, inheritance, and colonialism
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
This book, its fascinating characters, steady paced plot and haunting prose will stay with you long after reading
Cosmopolitan, ‘The 25 books we can’t wait to read in 2025’
Anna Hope plunges us straight into the claustrophobic world of a family turned inside out by the death of the deeply flawed patriarch, and propels us towards a devastating conclusion. Compelling
Kirsty Wark