Patrick Melrose

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner Never Mind, the first installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, follows five-year-old Patrick through a single day, as the Melrose family awaits the arrival of guests. Bright and imaginative, young Patrick struggles daily to contend with the searing cruelty of his father and the resignation of his embattled mother. But, on this day he must endure an unprecedented horror-one that splits his world in two. In Never Mind, St. Aubyn renders this vivid tragedy with profound grace and precision, and introduces us to the unforgettable, complex figure of Patrick Melrose.

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner In Bad News, the second installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry and profound series, the Patrick Melrose Cycle, Patrick, now in his twenties, is traveling to New York to collect the ashes of his recently deceased father. Deep in the grasp of a crippling drug addiction, he spends most of his time searching for a fix, alternately suffering from withdrawals, hallucinations, and anguish over his tyrannical father's death. Written in unflinching, breathtakingly resonant prose, St. Aubyn paints another haunting landscape of human suffering.

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner Some Hope, this installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, is centered on a dinner party, attended by the illustrious and profane elite of British society. Patrick, who is now thirty and trying to recover from his addictions, considers becoming a lawyer, having spent most of his inheritance and in need of a job. Some Hope sees Patrick interacting with the contemptible but always fascinating British aristocracy again, and discovering that there might indeed be some hope for him after all.

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner Man Booker–shortlisted Mother's Milk, the fourth installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, sees Patrick as a lawyer, married, with a five-year-old child and another on the way. The novel shifts points of view from Patrick-furious over his mother's decision to sell their mansion in the South of France to a ridiculous New Age hippie-to Patrick's wife, overburdened by motherhood, to Patrick's mother, growing senile and despondent, and even to Patrick's young son Robert, who reflects with hilarious and disturbing clarity on the moments of his birth.

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year • Named One of the best books of the Year by The Telegraph and Esquire 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.