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The Patrick Melrose Novels -Edward St Aubyn
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THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS : With An Introduction By Zadie Smith

Edward St Aubyn
WELL USED, PAPERBACK

RM15.00

Complete Collection of Edward St Aubyn’s Award-Winning Novels of Childhood Trauma And Aristocratic Decadence.

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9781447253525
Book Condition WELL USED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Picador
Publication Date 16 Jun 2016
Pages 896
Weight 0.88 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 6 cm
Availability: Out of stock

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★★ NATIONAL BESTSELLER ★★
★★ An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year ★★
★★ A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year★★
 
Filmed for Sky Atlantic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, The Patrick Melrose Novels is the complete collection of Edward St Aubyn’s award-winning novels of childhood trauma and aristocratic decadence. This Picador Classics edition features an introduction by author Zadie Smith.
 
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.


By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor.
 
From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.
 
Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.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. 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.
 
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Publisher Weekly Review :
 
Coinciding with the publication of At Last, this omnibus edition shows that St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels may well constitute one of the most ambitious novel cycles since Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.
 
Where Powell wrote about a wide swath of 20th-century English social history, St. Aubyn’s milieu is more focused and constrained, detailing the life of the scion of the eccentric, wealthy, and cruel David and Eleanor Melrose.
 
Never Mind introduces the Melrose family over the course of a day and a half at their home in Provence, France: Dr. David Melrose, wife Eleanor, the five-year-old Patrick, and a vast assortment of hangers-on attracted to aristocracy and wealth.
 
The novel also introduces the author’s chief narrative technique of confining foreground action to a short time span, which affords him ample opportunity for musing and introspection, rendered with elegant, pithy prose.
 
In Bad News, Patrick is 22 and headed to New York in the 1980s “to collect my father’s corpse,” as he explains at customs. He’s also addicted to heroin and cocaine, and devotes as much time searching for drugs as he does coming to terms with his hated father and his death.
 
Eight years later, in Some Hope, Patrick is studying law (by renting courtroom dramas) and recovering, from both addiction and an excruciating personal history: “his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.”
 
And in Mother’s Milk, the most hopeful of the books in this volume, Patrick is married, somewhat unhappily, and a father (the amazing opening pages are written from the newborn Robert’s perspective; only hours old, he notes that “he couldn’t live with so much doubt and so much intensity”).
 
Still haunted by his own father, Patrick must deal with his mother’s crackpot philanthropy, sure to destroy the family fortune. This cycle is no ordinary family saga, or even that of an extraordinary family (which the Melrose clan certainly is); plot summaries don’t touch on St. Aubyn’s gift.
 
Though the author has clearly mined his own experience, he has refined it into something exquisite, an exploration of consciousness and the journey from the helplessness of childhood to “the pure inevitability of things being as they were,” as elegant a definition of acceptance as anyone is likely to write. And his serious purpose is buoyed by an abundant wit, laugh-out-loud funniness, and piercing observations into the world of privilege and entitlement.
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