'One of the most exciting new novels' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Very funny... Its deeply felt pages flew by' GUARDIAN

'Sexy, compassionate, uncommonly imaginative: I've never read anything quite like it' Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

London, 2014. Hal Lancaster – twenty-two, gay, Catholic, chops lines of cocaine with his myWaitrose card – is the reluctant heir of his father Henry, the sixteenth Duke of Lancaster. Henry is half tyrant, half martyr, with an investment in his eldest son that has grown into an obsession. While Hal floats between internships and drinking sessions, Henry keeps him in check with passive-aggression, religious guilt, and a cruelty that Hal sometimes confuses for tenderness.

When a grouse shooting accident – funny in retrospect – makes a romance out of Hal’s rivalry with fumblingly leftist family friend Harry Percy, Hal finds that he wants, for the first time, a life of his own. But his father Henry is an Englishman: he will not let his son escape tradition. To save himself, Hal must reckon not only with grief and shame but with the wounds of his family's past.

'Deeply enjoyable' Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea

'Thrillingly imaginative' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

"One of the most exciting new novels I’ve read in the past couple of months" - Financial Times

"Darkly humorous" - Stylist

"Dark and gripping… I couldn’t put it down" - Daily Mail

"With this reimagining, Bratton has created a marvelously detailed world of supernumerary aristocrats, as rich, toxic and wild as the best entries in the the Real Housewives franchise" - New York Times

"Fun... Bratton has a sharp eye for the absurdities of the white-saviour ex-public-schoolboy. And there’s a keen sense of the aching fugue of one’s early twenties" - Telegraph

"Bratton executes the project sharply, with humour and poignancy… He can really write" - Prospect