Albion shakes the country house novel to its foundations, in a story of family, inheritance and accountability 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.

Details

ISBN13: 9780241698433
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 368
Edition:
Publication Date: 05 Aug 2025
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.3(H)x15.4(L)x2.7(W)447
Weight (gm): 447

Author Biography

ANNA HOPE is the internationally prizewinning and bestselling author of Wake, The Ballroom, Expectation and The White Rock. She studied at Oxford University and RADA and her novels have been translated into over 20 languages. Expectation is currently being adapted for the screen by Clemence Poesy and Haut et Court films in Paris. She lives in Sussex with her family.

Reviews

Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma - without telling the reader what to think ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertainty * Sunday Times *
At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel, it's a triumphant read * 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 *
Her finest to date...With shades of Brideshead, as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memorable Cazalet Chronicles, Albion is a welcome addition to the body of literature centred around inherited wealth, ancestral homes, and difficult family dynamics * John Boyne, Irish Times *
If you like dysfunctional families and grand English country houses - who doesn’t, frankly? people in idyllic settings having unenviable times is so compelling - then this is for you * India Knight, HOME substack *
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 *