The Patrick Melrose Novels

Reviews

“Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch…Patrick often seems like a Philip Roth hero transplanted into a world of English privilege…The Patrick Melrose Series forms an exhaustive study of cruelty: its varieties, its motivations, its consequences, its moral implications…At Last is an intelligent and surprising novel, a fitting conclusion to the one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.” —The Boston Globe

“Implausibly brilliant speech…The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels …This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“Gorgeous, golden prose…St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can't convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can't face it.” —Lev Grossman, Time

“Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism…nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn's world---or more surprising---its philosophical density.” —Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine

“I read the five Patrick Melrose novels in five days. When I finished, I read them again.” —Ann Patchett, The Guardian

“Extraordinary…acidic humor, stiletto-sharp.” —Francine Prose

“Intoxicatingly witty.” —The New York Review of Books

“Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St. Aubyn?” —Brett Easton Ellis

“The most brilliant English novelist of his generation.” —Alan Hollinghurst

“Our purest living prose stylist.” —The Guardian (London)

“A smoldering portrait of a class largely banished from fiction.” —James Lasdun

“Exquisitely harrowing entertainment.” —Sam Lipsyte

“A spectacularly toxic confection.” —The Village Voice

“Dialogue as amusing as Waugh's and narrative even more deft than Graham Greene's.” —Edmund White

“A staggeringly good prose stylist.” —The Times (London)

“One of the preeminent writers of his generation.” —Will Self

“Perversely funny.” —People