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 orbited their entire lives. Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother 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, Philip’s estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with 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.
The novel flits between the perspectives of these characters and others and although it covers just five days, it is slow to build. But the climax is well worth the wait ... Has its limitations. Some of the characters feel like stereotypes ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertainty.
An ambitious novel, in scope and implication, and it begins promisingly. The scene is very well set ... This is a difficult topic, and it is here unsatisfyingly handled. The engaging – if over-numerous – family dramas and flawed cast of characters are all overshadowed ... As a conclusion it feels bland and seamless, which was surely not the intention.
