The patriarch of the Brooke family, Philip, has died and left his country estate in Sussex, ‘over two hundred years of English history … one thousand acres of land’, to his eldest daughter, Frannie. Frannie and Philip rewilded it together to create the successful Albion Project, in the process rebuilding a fraught relationship. The week before his funeral, she hears a nightingale for the first time: ‘it has worked.’ 

The wider family must return home for the funeral, haunted by their complicated relationships with Philip and insistent in their claims to part of the inheritance. Anna Hope’s novel focuses on the five days of tension between Philip’s death and burial. Frannie’s younger siblings, like her, have difficult memories of their childhoods and lingering feelings of abandonment. Milo, a ‘boarding school survivor’, hopes to repackage some of his pain into an exclusive wellness clinic on the Faery Field, the site in the 1970s of the legendary Teddy Bears’ Picnic festival. Isa has been in love with Jack, who works on the land, since she was a teenager, but their relationship is obstructed by her belief that it won’t ‘make sense in the world beyond’. Frannie’s daughter, Rowan, grew up fascinated with ecosystems, but she has recently become morbidly interested in the process of decomposition. And for Philip’s widow, Grace, her husband’s death is somewhat liberating. Everything unfolds in the shadow of a portrait, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1789, of the estate’s first owner, Oliver Brooke. Outside, the first signs of spring – beautifully depicted by Hope – materialise in the Sussex countryside. When an invited guest interrupts the intimate funeral preparations with an uncomfortable revelation, the ripples are felt throughout the estate.

Hope expertly handles the question at the heart of the novel: when a person of outsized wealth dies, how should their family deal with the inheritance? Albion is exquisitely put together, with a tight structure and richly drawn characters.