I just raced through this collection of four short British novels. The first recounts the main character’s abuse as a child, at the hands of his father. The second features him at the age of 22, going on a heroin bender (a herabend?) while picking up his father’s ashes. (If there’s one thing you ...
Edward St. Aubyn slices and dices the English upper class in this group of short novels featuring Patrick Melrose. Melrose appears first as a five year old in Never Mind, which details the foolish lives of his parents and a group of their friends in southern France. Bad News is to drug addictio...
The only thing saving this book from getting one star is that St. Aubyn occasionally has moments of brilliance in his writing, and sentences come out that are funny and poignant and wonderfully descriptive. But those moments are amidst so much awfulness that I only made it through the first two ...
Forget the placid, prude nobles of "Downton Abbey". The nowadays English aristocracy is a repository of drug addicts, alchoolics, fatuous intellectuals and sex maniacs in different shades. A croud of useless human beings, staying together for the pleasure of insulting each other. The source is P....
I am an enormous fan of Edward St. Aubyn, and having seen him discuss this book at the Cheltenham Literary Festival earlier this year (and read a hilarious extract!) I was very excited and intrigued to read this book. This will be particularly enjoyable for anyone who has worked in the Publishing...
Back in 2011 Edward St. Aubyn's novel "At Last" was overlooked for the well known Booker literary prize, or even for the long list of the Booker prize. This surprised many in literary circles as 'At Last" was the fifth and final book in St. Aubyn's highly regarded and very popular Patrick Melrose...
