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As a glorious burgeoning of new growth bursts into life across the thousand acres that Philip Brooke has left to his eldest daughter Frannie, his two younger children - Milo and Isa (Isabella) - return to the family home. It’s a stunning, golden hued eighteenth-century mansion surrounded by parkland in the heart of the Sussex Downs, built by their ancestor, Oliver Brooke seven generations before our present moment.

The house and estate are also home to ‘The Albion Project’ an ambitious plan conceived by Frannie and implemented alongside her father in his final decade. The rewilding project has catalysed an astonishing regeneration that has already brought back rare birds to the woodland, fish to a previously choked river, and mammals and plants to an estate sucked dry by the agri-business of pheasant shoots. Frannie is fond of saying that everything she does is about looking seven generations ahead: for the future of her seven-year-old daughter
Rowan, and the communities and families that will follow, alongside the bigger responsibility to the eco- system.

However, for Frannie’s younger brother Milo, the house and estate are also the intended home of his own project, ‘The Clearing’ – a radical treatment centre based on monitored use of psilocybin in luxurious treehouse lodges, administered by therapists and ‘ritual managers' (alongside top chefs and other spa retreat necessities).

Their younger sister, Isa, now 38 and a teacher in London, also had a troubled childhood and was damaged, as were her siblings, by having to witness the suffering caused to their mother by their father Philip’s open and continuous philandering. For an entire decade of her childhood he left and went to live with an art dealer/gallerist in New York. Unlike her siblings, Isa never reconciled with her father and the memories of her childhood at the house are dominated by her adolescent affair with the estate keeper’s son, Jack.

Philip’s cruel narcissism casts a shadow over them all, and his wife Grace is longing to move out of the big house and into the cottage where Frannie and Rowan lived. But unexpected news from New York, and the arrival of a stranger leave the entire family unmoored and in shock.

Anna Hope is the author of five novels, three of which (including Albion) are being developed for the screen. She studied at Oxford and trained at RADA.
Jonathan Coe describes Albion as ‘A superb novel deftly woven around themes of class, national identity and environmental collapse. In Albion Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today’

Albion by Anna Hope is read by the author
Abridged by Jill Waters and Anna Hope
Produced by Jill Waters and The Waters Company