Patrick Melrose: The Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

Overview

NOW COLLECTED INTO ONE VOLUME FOR THE FIRST TIME, ALL FIVE INSTALLMENTS OF EDWARD ST. AUBYN'S CELEBRATED PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner

Edward St. Aubyn has penned one of the most acclaimed series of the decade with the Patrick Melrose Novels. Now you can read all five novels in one volume: Never Mind, Bad News, Mother's Milk, Some Hope, and At Last.

By turns harrowing and hilarious, this ambitious novel cycle dissects the English upper class. Edward St. Aubyn offers his reader the often darkly funny and self-loathing world of privilege as we follow Patrick Melrose's story of abuse, addiction, and recovery from the age of five into early middle age.

The Patrick Melrose Novels are "a memorable tour de force" (The New York Times Book Review) by one of "the most brilliant English novelists of his generation" (Alan Hollinghurst).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250305664
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/08/2018
Series:	Patrick Melrose Series
Edition description:	Media Tie
Pages:	880
Sales rank:	1,141,715
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Edward St. Aubyn was born in London. His acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (winner of the Prix Femina étranger and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and At Last. The series was made into a BAFTA Award–winning Sky Atlantic TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. St. Aubyn is also the author of A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge (short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Lost for Words (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), and Dunbar, his reimagining of King Lear for the Hogarth Shakespeare project.

Editorial Reviews

Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch…Patrick often seems like a Philip Roth hero transplanted into a world of English privilege…The Patrick Melrose Series forms an exhaustive study of cruelty: its varieties, its motivations, its consequences, its moral implications…At Last is an intelligent and surprising novel, a fitting conclusion to the one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.” —The Boston Globe

“Implausibly brilliant speech…The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels …This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“Gorgeous, golden prose…St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can't convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can't face it.” —Lev Grossman, Time

“Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism…nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn's world—-or more surprising—-its philosophical density.” —Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine

“I read the five Patrick Melrose novels in five days. When I finished, I read them again.” —Ann Patchett, The Guardian

“Extraordinary…acidic humor, stiletto-sharp.” —Francine Prose

“Intoxicatingly witty.” —The New York Review of Books

“Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St. Aubyn?” —Brett Easton Ellis

“The most brilliant English novelist of his generation.” —Alan Hollinghurst

“Our purest living prose stylist.” —The Guardian (London)

“A smoldering portrait of a class largely banished from fiction.” —James Lasdun

“Exquisitely harrowing entertainment.” —Sam Lipsyte

“A spectacularly toxic confection.” —The Village Voice

“Dialogue as amusing as Waugh's and narrative even more deft than Graham Greene's.” —Edmund White

“A staggeringly good prose stylist.” —The Times (London)

“One of the preeminent writers of his generation.” —Will Self

“Perversely funny.” —People

From the Publisher