Edward St. Aubyn

Follows the life of Patrick Melrose, a member of an upper class English family, through his traumatic childhood with an abusive father, drug addiction, fatherhood, and the possible loss of his family home.

Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Never Mind

A dramatic and powerful reflection on nature, nurture, inquiry, perception, and the myriad ways we try to understand what it means to be alive Double Blind is the masterful new novel from Edward St. Aubyn: an ambitious, thrilling synthesis of art, science, and philosophy that explores some of the biggest ideas and most pressing questions of our times. Following three friends and their circle through a year of transformation, and moving between London, Oxford, Cap d’Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, it is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge—for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival—and the consequences of fleeing what we already know about others and ourselves.

A Novel

Double Blind

Set among the vertiginous contrasts of luxury and squalor which characterize New York City, this second volume of a trilogy is a harrowing but often funny portrait of obsessive drug use. It is the sequel to Never Mind, which won a Betty Trask Award.

Bad News

For Patrick Melrose, ‘family’ is more than a double-edged sword. As friends, relations and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor – an heiress who forsook the grandeur of her upbringing for ‘good works’, freely bestowed upon everyone but her own child – Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn’t necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined. Yet as the service ends and the family gather for a final party, as conversations are overheard, danced around and concertedly avoided, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current. And at the end of the day, alone in his rooftop bedsit, it seems to promise some form of safety, at last. One of the most powerful reflections on pain and acceptance, and the treacheries of family, ever written, At Lastis the brilliant culmination of the Melrose books. It is a masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional truth.

At Last

'I really did have an empire, you know,' said Dunbar. 'Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?' Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting the wisdom of past decisions... Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? Edward St Aubyn is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life. His take on King Lear, Shakespeare's most devastating family story, is an excoriating novel for and of our times - an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

Dunbar

A frenzied competition for a major British literary award pits several colorful characters against one another and is complicated by an accidental entry, a scandal involving a judge and a vengeful reject. By the award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose series. 50,000 first printing.

Lost for Words

Mother's Milk

The third of the Melrose novels. Some Hope finds Patrick qualified as a barrister and speaking for the first time about the damage in his past, searching for redemption amidst a crowd of glittering social dragonflies whose vapidity is the subject of his most stinging and memorable barbs. It ends at a party in Gloucestershire with one of the most dazzling comic set pieces of the twentieth century.

Some Hope

THE FOURTH PATRICK MELROSE NOVEL The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age foundation, and his young son Robert understanding far more than he should. But even as the family struggles against the pull of its ever-present past, a new generation brings a new tenderness, and the possibility of change.

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

Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, and At Last

The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

The Novels

Patrick Melrose

FROM THE MAN BOOKER–SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS Called “the most brilliant novelist of his generation” (Alan Hollinghurst), Edward St. Aubyn captivated and astonished readers and critics alike with his mesmerizing quintet, the Patrick Melrose novels. Its publication introduced one of the most complex and fascinating protagonists in modern fiction. Now being published for the first time in America, On the Edge is an uproarious and sharply rendered satire of the New Age, which shows St. Aubyn at his finest. Peter Thorpe is disillusioned with his conventional life as a merchant banker until he meets Sabine, the most enchanting and enigmatic woman he’s ever encountered. His desire for her reaches such a pitch that he overturns his whole life, leaving everything behind to follow her into the stronghold of the New Age movement among the stunning peaks and valleys of Big Sur, California. There he meets an eccentric cast of spiritual seekers, joining them in pursuit of that elusive something (happiness?), which he never before dared to imagine possible.

On the Edge

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter of Aliens with a Human Heart, ex-husband and absent father, has been given 6 months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling. Charlie's novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As the train gets stuck at Didcot Junction and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous young woman who is his nemesis, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty and thoughtful, Edward St Aubyn's dazzling new novel overturns expectations and probes the very heart of being.

Edward St. Aubyn

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