From the bestselling author of The Ballroom

The White Rock

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE BALLROOM AND EXPECTATION 
 
They are separating, she and her husband, after two decades together. 
This fact is new. 
There are many ways of telling the tale ... 
There are many different sides to every story ... 
 
A minibus journeys through rural Mexico. Inside it are twelve strangers on a pilgrimage to the White Rock, which stands, ancient and sacred, off the Pacific coast. Like many before them, over centuries and from across continents, they find themselves irresistibly drawn here, for answers, to give thanks, to seek protection. 
 
One of them is a writer. She is travelling with her husband and young daughter, as her faith in her marriage, and the future itself, is foundering. She has come to the White Rock in the hope of excavating a beginning from the rubble of many different endings. 
 
Here she will find the echoes of many stories: of conquest and resistance, of betrayal and belief, of the many different forms of violence and love. Stories that have already unravelled, and stories that might yet illuminate a passage through these uncertain times ... 
 
'An eco-novel you actually want to read' The Times 
 
'Its narrative sweep is capacious . . . It has ambition to match, musing on freedom and reciprocity [and] the redemptive power of storytelling. Impressive' Observer 
 
'Deeply moving' The i

Precise and perceptive ... Deeply satisfying ... We may struggle to find hope, Hope tells us, but it is there in the landscape, in faith and memory and ritual, in the ancient unchanging silences that persist'

An eco-novel you actually want to read ... She's an assured author with a knack for an arresting image ... It leaves you with a gentle sense that things keep going

Its narrative sweep is capacious ... It has ambition to match, musing on freedom and reciprocity, on the redemptive power of storytelling and the sustaining force of ritual ... Demonstrating impressive stylistic verve

Mesmerising ... Imaginative ... Among its many impressive elements is Hope's handling of the past ... Her greatest talent is in getting under the skin of her characters ... There is a subtle plangency in this powerful portrait of human folly and ferocity

Deeply moving ... I, for one, hope we hear plenty more from her

Full of wisdom about the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of our lives

Mysterious and beautiful. It reminded me of Cloud Atlas, but it's very much itself: so bold and wild, but controlled and fierce. It's stunning writing and it has left me with hope, that we can tell stories like these even as the carbon builds, and that imagination and ideas remain powerful and valid

Perfectly crafted, evocative prose which effortlessly transported me through two hundred and fifty years of history

Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

Brilliant. A stunning book of extraordinary, audacious scale

Poetic, philosophical and wildly captivating... Anna Hope captures the human condition and feeds it treats while you watch it shimmer. Her characters dance, crawl and blast off the page, like mystical beings who are at the same time solidly human. I swam in this book and didn't want to come up for air

Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals and Adults

I loved it. I became invested in each of the different eras and was struck by the sense of unknowable forces outliving us all. It is full of wisdom, intricate and emotional, and it will linger in my head for a long time

Dave Haslam, author of Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor

Anna Hope is such a generous and sensitive writer, and The White Rock is full of extraordinary voices and ideas. Absolutely a story for our times, and a fiercely important one, too

Clover Stroud, author of The Red of my Blood

I loved the sparseness, the moments of poetry, the quiet brutality. The voice throughout is fierce and graceful and utterly compelling; each central character is rich and beautifully pinpointed. It is her strongest work yet

The White Rock is a sublime, poetic, and visionary work of art

A minibus journeys through rural Mexico. Inside it are twelve strangers on a pilgrimage to the White Rock, which stands, ancient and sacred, off the Pacific coast. Like many before them, over centuries and from across continents, they find themselves irresistibly drawn here, for answers, to give thanks, to seek protection. 
 
One of them is a writer. She is travelling with her husband and young daughter, as her faith in her marriage, and the future itself, is foundering. She has come to the White Rock in the hope of excavating a beginning from the rubble of many different endings. 
 
Here she will find the echoes of many stories: of conquest and resistance, of betrayal and belief, of the many different forms of violence and love. Stories that have already unravelled, and stories that might yet illuminate a passage through these uncertain times ...

Anna Hope

Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma - without telling the reader what to think ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertainty

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel, it's a triumphant read

Albion is exquisitely put together, with a tight structure and richly drawn characters

There are shades of both Succession and Saltburn at play here, with Albion promising more of the emotional acuity that Anna Hope wielded so well in 2019’s Expectation

Independent – The best books to look out for in 2025

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, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama

Anna Hope’s beautiful new novel Albion explores the complexities of family, trauma, nature, human nature, landscape and escape in language that is as provocative as it is tender

Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

The English country house novel re-imagined for our times: an exceptionally well-drawn portrait of a battling family, which also astutely wrestles with the issues around rewilding, inheritance, and colonialism

Her finest to date...With shades of Brideshead, as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memorable Cazalet Chronicles, Albion is a welcome addition to the body of literature centred around inherited wealth, ancestral homes, and difficult family dynamics

A book that asks important questions about legacy - familial, historical and global - and which seeks to answer them with delicate insight and beautiful prose

If you like dysfunctional families and grand English country houses - who doesn’t, frankly? people in idyllic settings having unenviable times is so compelling - then this is for you

This book, its fascinating characters, steady paced plot and haunting prose will stay with you long after reading

Cosmopolitan, ‘The 25 books we can’t wait to read in 2025’

Anna Hope plunges us straight into the claustrophobic world of a family turned inside out by the death of the deeply flawed patriarch, and propels us towards a devastating conclusion. Compelling

A tour de force of a book. I love how Anna Hope weaves big ideas seamlessly into a compelling plot. It’s such a fine balance to strike and she does it so skilfully.

A compassionate, immersive novel that intelligently navigates historical pride and guilt, and the echo of history that resonates powerfully through the lives of Anna Hope’s compelling contemporary characters. 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

Wise and beautiful, with amazing nature writing to boot

The first British reparations novel ... I liked it a lot, being reminded of Toni Morrison's A Mercy in the tracing of different forms of power and privilege bestowed by gender and class as well as race …. 'The history of the transatlantic slave-trade is no longer a personal matter' is a text for our times

Nick Draper, founder of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database

It was around halfway through the first paragraph of Albion that I knew I had fallen in love with this book ... Anna Hope writes hauntingly beautiful poetic prose, and draws you deep into the heart of this family, their pain, joy, and love of the land they inhabit ... The book explores important, topical themes of today - nature, land and land ownership, climate change, class, and a contemporary reframing of colonial history - in a rich, layered, yet accessible way. I was inspired in particular by the way Anna Hope writes about human relationships with the natural world - as observer, actor, perpetrator, saviour, friend and foe ... This is a novel I will return to again and again

One of our most gifted contemporary writers

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.

Anna Hope

Praise for Albion

Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma - without telling the reader what to think ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertain ...

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel, it's a triumphant read

Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma - without telling the reader what to think ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertain ...

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel, it's a triumphant read

Hope breathes fresh thinking into the dusty corners and overgrown hedges of the English country house dilemma - without telling the reader what to think ... I closed Albion with a delicious sense of uncertain ...

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel

At once a sumptuous family drama and state-of-the-nation novel, it's a triumphant read

Books by Anna Hope

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter