On the Edge

Literature & Fiction

St.Aubyn, Edward

Contemporary

Vintage Books

NATIONAL BESTSELLER An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year "The Melrose Novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England." ―Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels―Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk, a Man Booker finalist―to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.
By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose's story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family's chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father's ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother's Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother's desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.
Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty―welcome to the declining British aristocracy.

The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

Humor & Satire

Picador

For Patrick Melrose, 'family' is more than a double-edged sword. As friends, relations and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor - an heiress who forsook the grandeur of her upbringing for 'good works', freely bestowed upon everyone but her own child - Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn't necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined. Yet as the service ends and the family gather for a final party, as conversations are overheard, danced around and concertedly avoided, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current. And at the end of the day, alone in his rooftop bedsit, it seems to promise some form of safety, at last. One of the most powerful reflections on pain and acceptance, and the treacheries of family, ever written, "At Last" is the brilliant culmination of the Melrose books. It is a masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional truth.

At Last. Edward St Aubyn

Picador USA

Edward St. Aubyn, "perhaps the most brilliant novelist of his generation" (Alan Hollinghurst), author of the internationally acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels, brings us a savage, satirical, outrageously entertaining novel of loyalty, betrayal, corporate greed, and the wisdom that shines through the accumulating indignities of age. 'I really did have an empire, you know,' said Dunbar. 'Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?' Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions . . . Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? Edward St. Aubyn is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life. Dunbar is a devastating family story and an excoriating novel for and of our times—an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

Dunbar (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Literary

Knopf Canada

Edward St. Aubyn is "great at dissecting an entire social world" (Michael Chabon, Los Angeles Times)
Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels were some of the most celebrated works of fiction of the past decade. Ecstatic praise came from a wide range of admirers, from literary superstars such as Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Michael Chabon to pop-culture icons such as Anthony Bourdain and January Jones. Now St. Aubyn returns with a hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award.
 The judges on the panel of the Elysian Prize for Literature must get through hundreds of submissions to find the best book of the year. Meanwhile, a host of writers are desperate for Elysian attention: the brilliant writer and serial heartbreaker Katherine Burns; the lovelorn debut novelist Sam Black; and Bunjee, convinced that his magnum opus, The Mulberry Elephant, will take the literary world by storm. Things go terribly wrong when Katherine's publisher accidentally submits a cookery book in place of her novel; one of the judges finds himself in the middle of a scandal; and Bunjee, aghast to learn his book isn't on the short list, seeks revenge.
 Lost for Words is a witty, fabulously entertaining satire that cuts to the quick of some of the deepest questions about the place of art in our celebrity-obsessed culture, and asks how we can ever hope to recognize real talent when everyone has an agenda.

Lost for Words: A Novel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set inLondon, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge--for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival--and the consequences of fleeing from what we know about others and ourselves. When Olivia meets a new lover just as she is welcoming her best friend, Lucy, back from New York, her dedicated academic life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off the grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two--but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy's boss, Hunter, Olivia's psychoanalyst parents, and a young mannamed Sebastian are pulled into the friends' orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged. Expansive, playful, and compassionate, Edward St. Aubyn'sDouble Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics, and neuroscience as it is about love, fear, and courage. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.

Double Blind: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012
One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books 2011
One of Esquire's Best Books of 2012
One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012
Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel. 
As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works―Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk―are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined. 
The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety. . . at last.

At Last: A Novel (The Patrick Melrose Novels, 5)

United States

Dr Melrose, wealthy, cynical, utterly selfish, dominates the life of his small family in the South of France. His wife Eleanor drinks to get away from the misery of his tyranny and his five-year-old son Patrick dices with death on the edge of the chateau's well.

Never Mind

Arrow (A Division of Random House Group)

Some Hope

Some hope

Heinemann

A beautifully modulated novel that shows Edward St. Aubyn at his sparkling bestCharlie 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, to write a novel-about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St. Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty, and thoughtful, Edward St. Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.

A Clue To The Exit

RANDOM HOUSE UK

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Books by St.Aubyn, Edward