Review
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Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and
everything in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for
the twenty-first century, by one of our greatest prose stylists
--Alice Sebold
"From the very first lines I was completely hooked . . . By turns
witty, moving and an intense social comedy, I wept at the end but
wouldn t dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason" --
Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph
"Wonderful caustic wit . . . Perhaps the very sprightliness of
the prose its lapidary concision and moral certitude represents
the cure for which the characters yearn. So much good writing is
in itself a form of " --Edmund White, Guardian
"The Patrick Melrose novels can be read as the navigational
charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched
harbor from which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out
of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range
of behaviors for which the term self-destructive is the mildest
of euphemisms. Some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and
hilarious novels of our era. . . Remarkable"Francine Prose, New
York Times
"Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation"
--Alan Hollinghurst
"The main joy of a St Aubyn novel is the exquisite clarity of his
prose, the almost uncanny sense he gives that, in language as in
mathematical formulae, precision and beauty invariably point to
truth . . . Characters in St Aubyn novels are hyper-articulate,
and the witty dialogue is here, as ever, one of the chief joys"
--Suzi Feay, Financial Times
"Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything
in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the 21st
century, by one of our greatest prose stylists" --Alice Sebold
"Edward St Aubyn, like Proust, has created a world in which no
one in their right mind would like to live but which feels real
and vivid and hilariously and dangerously vacuous. Who better
than he to turn to if your faith in the future of literary
fiction is wavering?" --Alan Taylor, Herald
"The act of investigative self-repair has all along been the
underlying project of these extraordinary novels. It is the
source of their urgent emotional intensity, and the determining
principle of their construction. For all their brilliant social
satire, they are closer to the tight, ritualistic poetic drama of
another era than the expansive comic fiction of our own . . . A
terrifying, spectacularly entertaining saga" --James Lasdun,
Guardian
"A masterpiece. Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts"
--Patrick McGrath
"Irony courses through these pages like adrenaline . . . Patrick
s intelligence processes his predicaments into elegant, lucid,
dispassionate, near-aphoristic formulations . . . Brimming with
witty flair, sardonic perceptiveness and literary finesse"
--Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"His prose has an easy charm that s a ferocious, searching
intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit whether turned
against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack
dealers is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and
tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the
perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn,
whether over the grand scale or within a single page of anecdote,
he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat"
--Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
"The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse and the waspishness
of Waugh. A joy" --
Zadie Smith, Harpers
"In the end, it is language that provides Patrick and St Aubyn
with consolation . . . St Aubyn s Melrose novels now deserve to
be thought of as an important roman-fleuve"
--Henry Hs, Times Literary Supplement
"Blackly comic, superbly written fiction . . . His style is crisp
and light; his similes exhilarating in their accuracy . . . St
Aubyn writes with luminous tenderness of Patrick s love for his
sons" --Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph
"Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic"
--Mariella Frostrup, Sky Magazine
"The sharpest and best series since Anthony Powell s A Dance to
the Music of Time. St Aubyn dances on the thin ice of modern
upper-class manners, the pain of displaced emotions and the hope
of happiness" --Saga Magazine
"The darkest possible comedy about the cruelty of the old to the
young, vicious and excruciatingly honest. It opened my eyes to a
whole realm of experience I have never seen written about. That s
the mark of a masterpiece" --The Times
"Edward St Aubyn has transformed his appalling childhood into
something dazzling and disturbing. A brilliant satire"
--Psychologies Magazine
"St Aubyn is a genuinely creative writer rather than a peddler of
misery memoirs and so his elegant, sardonic and often very funny
books transcend whatever circumstances led to their making . . .
His prose is a pleasure to read and his ins can be as
telling as they're funny. And forgiving, too" --Irish Independent
"St Aubyn conveys the chaos of emotion, the confusion of
heightened sensation, and the daunting contradictions of
intellectual endeavour with a force and subtlety that have an
exhilarating, almost therapeutic effect" --Francis Wyndham, New
York Review of Books
"I ve loved Edward St Aubyn s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them
all, now" --David Nicholls
"A humane meditation on lives blighted by the sins of the
previous generation. St Aubyn remains among the cream of British
novelists" --Sunday Times
"Clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British
fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny"
--David Sexton, Evening Standard
"St Aubyn puts an entire family under a micro, laying bare
all its painful, unavoidable complexities. At once epic and
, appalling and comic, the novels are masterpieces, each
and every one"
--Maggie O'Farrell
About the Author
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Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. His
superbly accled Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some
Hope (previously published collectively as the Some Hope
trilogy), Mother's Milk (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
2006) and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to
the Exit and On the Edge.