A free extract from my read of the month*

*at least!

Here is an extract from the brilliant novel I mentioned in Saturday’s post, Albion by Anna Hope. It came out earlier this month - I’d have got you a preview if I’d been more alert but I was too busy with my own book. Never mind, all is well, because here is an excerpt from the first chapter.

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.

But that is not all. Done less well, those sorts of novels often have a nostalgic, almost Edwardian quality, as if the nominally 21st century protagonists should really be twirling parasols and have Edwardian monobosoms, like pigeons.

Not here. This novel is completely modern. It is utterly unlike Succession, but for some reason it keeps reminding me of it. I mean, it really isn’t like it AT ALL… but it sort of is? It’s not just the family red in tooth and claw - more emotional acuity + impeccable writing. You’ll see what I mean when you read it.

Albion starts familiarly enough, with the death of the patriarch of the Brooke family and a gathering of the clan.

‘Her father used to say that the tree was at least four hundred years old; that it watched over this valley when the iron forge was fed by the dammed river, by the Hammer Pond. That it was here when her ancestor built his house, erecting twenty bedrooms of Sussex sandstone, stone that was quarried from less than a mile away from here, stone that had been deposited by the same river she can see below her now: millions of years of rock, laid down and down and down. That the tree saw the land pass from Brooke to Brooke, seven generations of them. And it is hers now - vertiginous thought - this house, this valley, this tree, this land; a thousand acres of it. They will lay her father in the earth in two days’ time. It is still hard, somehow, to believe he is gone.’

That’s Frannie, who wants to rewild her thousand acres. Her brother Milo wants to make the estate a playground for the super-rich, specifically the super-rich on shrooms (because psilocybin therapy cured Milo’s addiction and might thus cure said super-rich of their ghastliness). Isa, unhappily married, is more interested in seeing what happened to her childhood love, who still lives nearby. And then there’s their half-sister Clara, who has come from America for the funeral. DUM DUM DUUUUUUUMMMM…

I’m making it sound slightly potboilery, which it really isn’t - it’s a state of the nation novel about privilege, history, legacy, trauma, consequences, Englishness, family and the parlous state of the world, among other things. It is literary fiction, but with this minutely well-observed, quite potboilery narrative (set over five days), i.e. it is heaven. Anna Hope’s writing is in places transcendent, particularly when she writes about nature.

It’s out now - here it is on Bookshop, here it is at Waterstones and here it is on Amazon. Enjoy! Ew, I hate saying enjoy. But enjoy!

9780241698426 Albion

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I am writing this from the train, squinting at my phone and eating Mini Cheddars, so please excuse any typos.

Back very shortly with Lucinda Chambers’s picks for June. June! Already!