Showing results by author "Edward St. Aubyn" in All Categories

Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set between London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur and a re-wilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics and neuroscience as it is about love, fear and courage.

Now a major Sky TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril, and Patrick Melrose, now a husband and father, is trying to gather together the pieces of his life. Caught up in the turmoil of broken promises, assisted suicide, adultery and - most tender and terrifying of all - fatherhood, Patrick is still a long way from salvation, but even as the family struggles against the pull of its dark past, a new generation promises new light, new hope and - perhaps - the promise of a brighter future.

Now a major Sky TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Moving from Provence to New York to Gloucestershire, from the savageries of a childhood with a cruel father and an alcoholic mother to an adulthood fraught with addiction, Patrick Melrose is on a mission to escape himself. But the drugs don’t make him forget his past, and the glittering parties offer him no redemption....

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting 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.

The once-illustrious, once-wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery, and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age foundation, and his young son Robert understanding far more than he should. But even as the family struggles against the pull of its ever-present past, a new generation brings a new tenderness, and the possibility of change.

At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick's world in two.

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father's ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge - desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

Each of the judges of the Elysian Prize for literature has a reason for accepting the job. For the chairman, MP Malcolm Craig, it is backbench boredom, media personality Jo Cross is on the hunt for a 'relevant' novel, and Oxbridge academic Vanessa Shaw is determined to discover good writing. But for Penny Feathers of the Foreign Office, it's all just getting in the way of writing her own thriller.

As friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay their final respects to his mother, Eleanor, Patrick Melrose finds himself questioning whether a life without parents will be the liberation he has so long imagined. Yet as the memorial service ends and the family gathers one last time, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current: the chance of some form of safety - at last.

The author of the Patrick Melrose novels presents a razor-sharp, fabulously entertaining satire that cuts to the quick of some of the deepest questions about the place of art in our celebrity-obsessed culture. In conversation with Francine Prose.