Albion

FROM THE AUTHOR OF EXPECTATION'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 CoeThe Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home - twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone - to bury Philip, the head of the family: father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer - 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, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo's dreams are different: he envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where under the influence of psychedelic drugs a new ruling class will be reborn to make the world a better place.
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 has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and only 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. Grace, bruised and diminished after 50 years wedded to a man who cared nothing for her, is at a crossroads - wondering whether she might finally be able to choose between freedom and duty.
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.