The Patrick Melrose Novels

With an introduction by Zadie SmithPatrick 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.

“Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation”

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
-- 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

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.

The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls. Acclaimed for their searing wit and their deep humanity, The Patrick Melrose Novels follow Patrick through his shattered childhood, his haunted twenties, and into the complexities and chaos of middle age. As he negotiates the death of his parents, the compromises of marriage and, eventually, the tenderness of fatherhood, Patrick battles at first to stay ahead of his past, and then to find release from it. The Patrick Melrose Novels have been widely hailed as one of the major achievements in English fiction. Told with St Aubyn's astonishing precision, unnerving insight, and incomparable humour, this magnificent cycle of novels is a modern classic of universal resonance.'Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation' Alan Hollinghurst 'One of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny' David Sexton, Evening Standard

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