Mother's Milk - Softcover

St Aubyn, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 144720302X ISBN 13: 9781447203025

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

'The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century' Alice Sebold

About this title

Review

‘So good – so fantastically well written, profound and humane . . . it is heartstopping’ --Rachel Cooke, Observer

"From the very first lines I was completely hooked . . . By turns witty, moving and an intense social comedy, I wept at the end but wouldn t dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason" -- Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph

"Wonderful caustic wit . . . Perhaps the very sprightliness of the prose its lapidary concision and moral certitude represents the cure for which the characters yearn. So much good writing is in itself a form of health" --Edmund White, Guardian

"The Patrick Melrose novels can be read as the navigational charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range of behaviors for which the term self-destructive is the mildest of euphemisms. Some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and hilarious novels of our era. . . Remarkable"Francine Prose, New York Times

"Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation" --Alan Hollinghurst

"The main joy of a St Aubyn novel is the exquisite clarity of his prose, the almost uncanny sense he gives that, in language as in mathematical formulae, precision and beauty invariably point to truth . . . Characters in St Aubyn novels are hyper-articulate, and the witty dialogue is here, as ever, one of the chief joys" --Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the 21st century, by one of our greatest prose stylists" --Alice Sebold

"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

"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

"The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse and the waspishness of Waugh. A joy" --
Zadie Smith, Harpers

"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

"Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic" --Mariella Frostrup, Sky Magazine

"The sharpest and best series since Anthony Powell s A Dance to the Music of Time. St Aubyn dances on the thin ice of modern upper-class manners, the pain of displaced emotions and the hope of happiness" --Saga Magazine

"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

"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

"I ve loved Edward St Aubyn s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now" --David Nicholls

"A humane meditation on lives blighted by the sins of the previous generation. St Aubyn remains among the cream of British novelists" --Sunday Times

"Clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny" --David Sexton, Evening Standard

"St Aubyn puts an entire family under a microscope, laying bare all its painful, unavoidable complexities. At once epic and intimate, appalling and comic, the novels are masterpieces, each and every one"
--Maggie O'Farrell

From the Publisher

Winner of the South Bank Show Literature Award

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 144720302X
• ISBN 13: 9781447203025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288