Reviews


Never Mind

The first book in the Patrick Melrose series

 

‘A gruesome, and often gruesomely funny, study of the minor aristocracy at play …. These are the feckless aristos of A Handful of Dust updated, and with a few added taboos cast aside.  Magnificently though, St Aubyn never descends into caricature …. Without ever lapsing into self indulgence or sentimentality,  he wonderfully captures the ticks left by a disturbed childhood and hints chillingly at future madness’. – Literary Review

‘St Aubyn’s sparse, telling prose is as convincing when he writes from the raging, confused standpoint of a five-year-old as when he records the spiteful conversation of the rich’. – Independent on Sunday

‘Stylish and deadly accurate’  – Spectator

‘St Aubyn’s prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious intellect.  One of the finest writers of his generation’. – The Times

‘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, Harpers


Bad News

The second book in the Patrick Melrose series

 

‘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, New York Review of Books

‘St Aubyn’s spare, sharp prose keeps the reader back from the brink.  His characterisation is mercilessly precise;  his plotting marvelously collected.  One is left with the near-surreal picture of Melrose manoeuvring his sinister pallor from airport to luxurious apartment to dingy night club, somehow managing to keep appointments, with farce in close attendance’. – Daily Telegraph

‘A beautifully written novel, whose harrowing but fiercely funny portrait of addition is the best I’ve ever read’. – Time Out

‘St Aubyn’s observation …. Is razor sharp.  He is a very funny writer’. – Times Literary Supplement

‘Our purest living prose sylist’. – Guardian


Some Hope

The third book in the Patrick Melrose series

 

‘Like everyone else, Edward St Aubyn writes about what he knows – childhood, sex, parties, heroin …. powerful, elegantly organised and often very funny.’ – Lindsey Duguid, Independent on Sunday

‘He seems to dip a stiletto in ink…St.Aubyn’s prose is cruel, witty, sardonic and sad’. – Sunday Times

‘St Aubyn has a thin, steely prose style which cuts through upper class pretension like wire through wedding cake’. – Tom Shone, The Times Literary Supplement

‘A masterpiece. Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts’. – Patrick McGrath

‘A memorable tour de force’. – New York Times Book Review


Mother’s Milk

The fourth book in the Patrick Melrose series

 

‘Wonderful caustic wit …. Perhaps the very sprightliness of the prose – its lapidary concision and moral certitude – represents the cure for which the characters yearn.  So much good writing is in itself a form of health’. – Edmund White, Guardian

‘Edward St Aubyn’s novels are so intoxicatingly witty that their high seriousness may not be immediately apparent. This seriousness is not tacked on as a solemn ‘message’; it is intrinsic to his ferociously comic vision. Yet they cannot be described as social satires: there is no facile exaggeration, no smug misanthropy or studied indignation involved in the uncomfortable truths he tells.’ – Francis Wyndham, The New York Review of Books Click here to read a full review by Francis Wyndham in the New York Review of Books.

‘A huge revelation..it’s the darkest possible comedy about the cruelty of the old to the young, vicious and excruciatingly honest. It opened my eyes to a whole realm of experience I have never seen written about. That’s the mark of a masterpiece.’ – Vanora Bennett, The Times

‘In a market where the dullest writers are routinely described as ‘wickedly funny’, he’s the real thing…..These books are hilarious and terrifying, shot through with pain and wisdom and written in the most extraordinary cold, pure style: rockets of wit exploding like flares to highlight the bleakness of the terrain’ – Independent on Sunday

Mother’s Milk showcases St Aubyn’s luuminous and acidic prose, as well as his masterful ability to combine the most excruciating emotional pain with the driest comedy’ – Herald Express

‘A fantastically funny, humane and serious novel about the destructive influence of parents upon their children, and the possibility of escaping it.’ – Anthony Quinn, The Daily Telegraph

‘St Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart’.  – The Times

‘So good – so fantastically well written, profound and humane…it is heartstopping’. – Rachel Cooke, Observer

Mother’s Milk has the cerebral excitement and piercing funniness of St Aubyn at his brilliant best’. – Tatler


At Last

The fifth book in the Patrick Melrose series

 

‘This triumphant conclusion to St Aubyn’s sequence about boyhood traumas and adult tribulations fizzes with his astringent verbal flair and lethal ear for dialogue’. – Peter Kemp – Sunday Times

‘From the very first lines I was completely hooked on At Last by Edward St Aubyn. It is in fact the last of the trilogy featuring Patrick Melrose, but a complete story in itself. However, I can’t think of a better summer read than taking all three books, the first two, including the Booker-nominated Mother’s Milk, and ending, gloriously, with At Last. By turns witty, moving and an intense social comedy, I wept at the end but wouldn’t dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason’ – Antonia Fraser, Summer Reading choice, Sunday Telegraph

‘St Aubyn’s technique is to crystallise emotional intensity into sentences of arctic beauty, which can be caustically witty or brutal. In At Last this crystallisation and control are on glittering display. At Last is a novel of exquisite observation which conveys a movement towards peace . . . We have reached the pinnacle of a series that has plunged into darkness and risen towards light. At Last is both resounding end and hopeful beginning.’ – Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph

“The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements in contemporary British fiction… stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny’. – from the interview by David Sexton in the Evening Standard

At Last is a miraculously wrought piece of art’. – Suzi Feay, Financial Times

‘The slashing intelligence of Patrick’s analysis of himself and his upper-crust world, combined with the epigrammatic wit of the dialogue (sometimes compared to Martin Amis, though Stoppard seems a closer match), gave what might have been a confessional exercise the reach and resonance of tragedy; The act of investigative self-repair has all along been the underlying project of these extraordinary novels. It is the source of their urgent emotional intensity, and the determining principle of their construction. For all their brilliant social satire, they are closer to the tight, ritualistic poetic drama of another era than the expansive comic fiction of our own; Much of the pleasure of At Last comes from the clash of these different perspectives as they shift and collide in Patrick’s mercilessly lucid mind; [A] terrifying, spectacularly entertaining saga’ – James Lasdun, ‘Book of the Week’, Guardian

‘In most novels the elegant, hilarious or clever sentences stand out because they lie sufficiently far apart, but in At Last they are squashed together munificently on every page. Occasionally, the reader must pause at a description and give it the space and appreciation that would be given to a memorable line of poetry ; A humane and enchanting novel, which is profoundly funny, profoundly sad, and most of all profound’ – Simon Baker, Literary Review

‘You don’t need to have read Edward St Aubyn’s preceding novels to enjoy At Last; Nonetheless, such is the wealth of detail St Aubyn packs into every lacerating sentence, newcomers will probably be tempted back to the beginning of this story’. – Claire Allfree, Metro

‘This is the fifth novel that Edward St Aubyn has written about his alter ego Patrick Melrose, though it isn’t too late to join in; Patrick’s road to recovery deserves another book (at least). After this delicious instalment readers will want one too’ – Daily Express

‘The writing is brilliant and some of it is extraordinarily funny; brilliantly realised’ – David Aaronovitch, ‘Saturday Review’, BBC Radio 4

‘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

‘I loved Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now’. – David Nicholls


Dunbar

‘Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic end game of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune’. – Patrick Skene Catling, Spectator

‘Some of the most striking recent insights into King Lear come in a novel.  Edward St Aubyn’s Dunbar, in which the fool is a telly comedian and the wheel of fortune becomes the casino of money markets, features a world of “wild plasticity”. Hallucinogenic inner and outer landscapes feed each other’. – Susannah Clapp, Observer

‘Perhaps Edward St Aubyn’s most impressive achievement in this re-telling, then – the latest in an ongoing series of Shakespeare novelisations by contemporary authors, published as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project – is to find a way of structuring the story so that it rattles along at a breathless pace from start to finish.  Even though we know what is going to happen, Dunbar is still a page-turner’. – Roger Cox, Yorkshire Post


Lost For Words

Lost for Words is self evidently a jeu d’esprit – not so much revenge against Man Booker judges of the recent past but a release of energy after the completion of his five part autobiographical Melrose sequence.  It’s written with pleasure, and there’s plenty of pleasure here for nimble readers’. – John Mullen, Guardian

Lost for Words is a pure farcical pleasure’. – Anthony Domestico, San Francisco Chronicle

‘ It is flush with excellent jokes that range from brilliant to idiotic, most of them at the expense of the literary world.  Perhaps, dangerously, this merriment is the ultimate insiders guide to literary prizes. In less able hands, this subject could get cosy, but St Aubyn delivers in high style exactly what readers of this supple and deadly master have come to expect’. – Helen Elliott, Spectrum


A Clue to the Exit

‘Striking metaphors and resonant evocations of sea and desert …. accomplished reflections on the possibility of selfhood and the insolubility of consciousness’. – Sunday Times

‘Dazzling, challenging and absorbing …. Once more, St Aubyn takes us to the very limits of the expressible’. – Spectator

‘Playful and lingeringly witty … Tantalising’. – Evening Standard


On the Edge

‘An intellectually informed, richly insightful and vigorously funny take on the modern condition’ – Sunday Times

‘Pierced with goodwill, tenderness and a new kind of thoughtfulness’ – The Spectator

‘His satire is unfailingly funny and immensely satisfying’ – The Guardian

‘Playful and lingeringly witty … Tantalising’. – Evening Standard


Double Blind

‘If, as Henry James said, the first duty of the novelist is to be interesting, he would be happy in St Aubyn’s company.   Double Blind is emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating.  There are reflections and conversations here which adroitly evoke those important intersections where science and our urgent contemporary concerns meet.  I was gripped by it’ – Ian McEwan

Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace.  But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades’ – Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

‘This is a novel with heart.  Double Blind is both clever and compassionate, confirming St Aubyn as among the brightest lights of contemporary British literature’ – Alex Preston, Spectator

‘There is in Double Blind a compassion that St Aubyn has elsewhere tended to either eschew or keep implicit.  Despite the novel’s acerbic edge, St Aubyn is attentive to his characters’ suffering and vulnerability whatever their privileges … St Aubyn’s prose is elegant as anybody familiar with his previous work might expect.  Indeed, so consistent is the writing’s quality the reader is apt to miss its many charms, acclimated as they are to it … Double Blind is yet another ambitious work by one of today’s finest literary stylists’ – Luke Warde, Irish Independent

‘This is the best kind of novel of ideas, as entertaining as it is chewy, not to mention immensely pleasurable on the sentence level’ – Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail