ALBION. Even the name of the eighteenth-century estate sounds regal. It is not a property without secrets. Secrets that are about to be revealed when the family gathers for Philip Brooke's funeral. Philip inherited control of the ancestral property fifty years ago and his lifestyle after that heavily impacted the lives of those who were part of his world. Left in his wake are his wife who he abandoned and cheated on openly, his eldest daughter, Frannie, to whom he left the estate, his son Milo who has aspirations of his own for the property and his troubled youngest daughter Isa. The funeral was to be an immediate family affair only. That changed when Clara, the daughter of the woman Philip lived with in America appeared. However, she is not who everyone thought she might be. She is someone who did her homework before coming to the funeral.
ALBION, by Anna Hope, is the story of a fractured family. Frannie, who once took up residence in a tree, is the mother of a young child who will one day inherit the property. She and her father were in the process of rewilding it and now this monumental task falls on her shoulders. Milo, a sometimes recovering addict expects her to honor their father's promise to him of land to build a retreat for the elite. Isa, long estranged from her father has different issues. She fell in love once with an employee of the estate. Did she ever get over him? Perhaps the most profound character of all is the house and land itself. Teeming with life and ghosts of its own, it has a history and story of its own.
Beautifully told, the author perfectly blends the characters' stories together. Powerfully conveyed, readers can see what Philip and those before him have left behind. What remains to be seen is what they do when their legacy is in question.
Powerful and compelling, ALBION is a remarkable story. Highly recommended.
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.
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