The Patrick Melrose Novels

Description

With an introduction by Zadie Smith Patrick slid back down in his chair and sprawled in front of the view. He noticed how his tears cooled as they ran down his cheeks. Washed eyes and a tired and empty feeling. Was that what other people meant by peaceful? Collected here together in a single volume are the complete Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, and At Last. Acclaimed for their searing wit and their deep humanity, this magnificent cycle of novels - in which Patrick Melrose battles to survive the savageries of his childhood and lead a self-determined life - is one of the major achievements in English fiction.

Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. His superbly acclaimed Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope (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, On the Edge and Lost for Words.

Extraordinary -- Sam Mendes If something has kept you from reading this great novel in five parts, let it keep you no more . . . the experience of St Aubyn is indelible -- Jonathan Franzen I've loved Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now -- David Nicholls At once epic and intimate, appalling and comic, the Melrose novels are masterpieces -- Maggie O'Farrell Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St Aubyn * Brett Easton Ellis * Humour, 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 * Edward St Aubyn is among the handful of the current giants of English fiction * Edmund White * Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation -- Alan Hollinghurst The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse, the waspishness of Waugh. A joy -- Zadie Smith 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 *