Patrick Melrose Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope

Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in Edward St Aubyn's Emmy nominated semi-autobiographical series, filmed for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic Patrick.

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 . . .

Searingly funny and deeply humane, Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope. Patrick Melrose Volume 2 is also available, containing the final two novels in the series, Mother’s Milk and At Last.


The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny (David Sexton Evening Standard)

Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation (Alan Hollinghurst)

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)

St Aubyn’s prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. One of the finest writers of his generation (The Times)

Nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn’s world – or more surprising – its philosophical density (Zadie Smith)

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)

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)

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)

I’ve loved Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now (David Nicholls)

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)