-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
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 Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone—to bury their patriarch, Philip. Father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer, Philip was the blinding sun around which the family has orbited their entire lives.
Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, 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 to create a better world. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other.
Isa, Philip's estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover if her feelings for him are creating the fault lines in her marriage. Grace, bruised and diminished after fifty years in a loveless marriage, is at a crossroads, wondering whether she may finally have the strength to choose between freedom and duty. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture 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.
"The plot slows down in spots—so many characters, so many backstories—and dialogue sometimes sounds more like editorials than conversation, but when the Brookes gather (along with a few surprise guests), sparks fly...Privilege has its own problems, and this engaging novel brings them to life." —Kirkus Reviews
"Hope wrangles her large cast with aplomb as she probes issues of class and stewardship. This gratifies." —Publishers Weekly
"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, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace
"A superb deftly woven novel ... 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 Mr. Wilder & Me
"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 The Memory of Animals and Unsettled Ground
This information about Albion was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anna Hope is an English writer and actress from Manchester. She is perhaps best known for her role as a humanoid cat in the popular BBC series "Doctor Who".
Hope studied English at Oxford, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and then received an M.A. in creative writing at Birkbeck. She lives in London.
If you liked Albion, try these:
by Therese Anne Fowler
Published 2021
A gripping contemporary novel that examines the American dream through the lens of two families living side by side in an idyllic neighborhood, over the course of one summer that changes their lives irrevocably, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z and A Well-Behaved Woman.
by Rumaan Alam
Published 2019
From the celebrated author of Rich and Pretty, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep.
by Carolyn Parkhurst
Published 2017
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel, a taut, emotionally wrenching story of how a seemingly "normal" family could become desperate enough to leave everything behind and move to a "family camp" in New Hampshire - a life-changing experience that alters them forever.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
