November 2003

Open City Magazine & books (www.bigsmallpressmall.com/opencity.html)

Some Hope: A Trilogy

Edward St. Aubyn

Some Hope marks the U.S. debut of Edward St. Aubyn, highly acclaimed in the U.K. as one of the most original, intelligent, and acerbically witty voices of our time. From Provence to New York to Gloucestershire, through the savageries of a childhood with a tyrannical father and an alcoholic mother, to a young adulthood fraught with drug addiction, we follow Patrick Melrose’s search for redemption amidst a crowd of glittering social dragonflies whose vapidity is the subject of his most stinging and memorable barbs. A story of abuse, addiction, and recovery, the trilogy is a haunting yet hilarious depiction of a journey to and from the farthest limits of the human experience.

A masterpiece. Edward St. Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts. His wit, his profound intelligence, and his exquisite control of a story that rapidly descends to the lower depths before somehow painfully rising again—all go to distinguish the trilogy as fiction of a truly rare and extraordinary quality.

--Patrick McGrath

With his savage wit and scalpel-sharp prose Edward St. Aubyn is the ideal writer to dissect the bloated corpse of the English upper classes. Mordant, acute, and ultimately deeply moving, this trilogy establishes him as one of the preeminent English writers of his generation.

--Will Self

Speedballs, incest, and royalty are just a few of the things that make Some Hope exquisitely harrowing entertainment. Beyond the highborn squalor, though, is a saga of genuine wit and heartache.

--Sam Lipsyte