‘Edward St Aubyn, like Proust, has created a world in which no one in their right mind would like to live but which feels real and vivid and hilariously and dangerously vacuous. Who better than he to turn to if your faith in the future of literary fiction is wavering?’
Alan Taylor, Herald
‘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 . . . A terrifying, spectacularly entertaining saga’
James Lasdun, Guardian
‘The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse and the waspishness of Waugh. A joy’
Zadie Smith, Harpers
‘A masterpiece. Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts’
Patrick McGrath
‘Irony courses through these pages like adrenaline . . . Patrick’s intelligence processes his predicaments into elegant, lucid, dispassionate, near-aphoristic formulations . . . Brimming with witty flair, sardonic perceptiveness and literary finesse’
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
‘His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit – whether turned against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack dealers – is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether over the grand scale or within a single page of anecdote, he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat’
Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
‘In the end, it is language that provides Patrick – and St Aubyn – with consolation . . . St Aubyn’s Melrose novels now deserve to be thought of as an important roman-fleuve’
Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
‘Blackly comic, superbly written fiction . . . His style is crisp and light; his similes exhilarating in their accuracy . . . St Aubyn writes with luminous tenderness of Patrick’s love for his sons’
Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph
‘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
‘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’
The Times
‘Edward St Aubyn has transformed his appalling childhood into something dazzling and disturbing. A brilliant satire’
Psychologies Magazine
‘St Aubyn is a genuinely creative writer rather than a peddler of misery memoirs and so his elegant, sardonic and often very funny books transcend whatever circumstances led to their making . . . His prose is a pleasure to read and his insights can be as telling as they’re funny. And forgiving, too’
Irish Independent