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...
Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband and absent father, has been given six 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, write a novel – about death. Set on a train, his manuscript involves characters...
‘Why couldn’t it be a genetic inheritance?’‘The rapid accumulation of cultural and behavioural habits cannot be explained genetically,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘because the geneticists insist that behaviour does not modify the genome. Adaptation can only occur through the slow, blind process of natural s...
In fact, he really hoped that these people, people like him who had been hopelessly dependent on drugs, obsessed with them, and unable to think about anything else for years, would get their lives together. If they had to use this obscure slang in order to do so, then that was a pity but not a re...
She seems so ghastly, I’m embarrassed to have given up so much time looking for her. I suppose I was really looking for you, or enlightenment, or a long holiday, or something. How do you feel about it? It must be strange for you too.’‘It’s perfect,’ said Crystal. ‘It’s better that she should be h...
In a perversion of filial piety, Poppy had asked Vanessa to use her critical skills to improve the little manifesto she was writing for a ‘pro-ana’ website, extolling the hidden ecstasies of her suicidal eating disorder. Vanessa felt that her relationship with her daughter had now gone irretrieva...
‘It would be sheer hypocrisy,’ she told her daughter. ‘I despise disinheritance, and I think it’s wrong to go to someone’s funeral boiling with rage. The party’s a different matter: it’s about supporting you and Patrick. I’m not pretending it doesn’t help that it’s just round the corner.’ ‘In tha...