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Albion

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Albion

By: Anna Hope
Narrated by: Anna Hope
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

FROM THE 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 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.

'Superb … 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

‘Beautiful . . . As provocative as it is tender’ Miranda Cowley Heller, author of
The Paper Palace

‘The English country house novel reimagined for our times ... Exceptionally well-drawn’ 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

‘Hauntingly beautiful . . . This is a novel I will return to again and again’ Louisa Adjoa Parker

Albion balances the reality of who the English were against the hope of who we might become’ Richard Beard, author of The Day That Went Missing

© Anna Hope 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage Dream
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Absolutely loved this book - great narration too. Interesting characters - I was hooked from the word go.

Descriptions of nature

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After a gentle start I couldn’t stop listening. Peppered with such beautiful imagery of British wildlife is a moving story that paints a picture of English privilege and history. It has left me feeling reflective.
I love the way Anna does research to give a window into our culture and our times.

Another great work by Anna Hope

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I liked the distinctiveness of the main characters and seeing things from their perspective. A family drama that gently connects to historical trends that shape the modern world as well as this one family.

Albion a family microcosm

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I was really enjoying this story of the ancestral home and the complex family's arguments over it; all the issues over woofland and nature and land and creatures etc were involving and moving and the characters interesting. But then the author brought in a completely incredible historical researcher from America called Clara who has found that the home was originally bought with the proceeds from the slave trade. Her intrusion into the family funeral and her whole character were totally incredible. The story became overburdened with political argument and became unbearably tedious. Ruined! Such a pity. Beautifully read.

Ruined half way through

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So enjoyed this - starts as a family sag and becomes something much more interesting. Beautifully read by the author too.

A wonderful tale

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