Bad News

(Paperback)

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Ive loved Edward St Aubyns Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now - David Nicholls

Bad News is the second of Edward St Aubyns semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the aristocratic addict, Patrick.

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his fathers ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patricks 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.

Bad News was originally published, along with Never Mind and Some Hope, as part of a three-book omnibus also called Some Hope.

The Melrose novels are remarkable ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

Reviews

I've loved Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now -- David Nicholls
Our purest living prose stylist * The Guardian *
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 Melrose novels are remarkable ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written. A brilliantly controlled story of a life sent out of control -- Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
A beautifully written novel, whose harrowing but fiercely funny portrait of addiction is the best Ive ever read * Time Out *
Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation -- Alan Hollinghurst
Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgment, 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 wouldnt dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason -- Antonia Fraser, The 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 Patricks love for his sons -- Caroline Moore, 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, The Guardian
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, The Guardian
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 OFarrell
Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic -- Mariella Frostrup, Sky Magazine
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 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, The New York Times
A masterpiece. Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts -- Patrick McGrath
A humane meditation on lives blighted by the sins of the previous generation. St Aubyn remains among the cream of British novelists * The Sunday Times *
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, The Financial Times
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. Thats the mark of a masterpiece * The Times *
The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse and the waspishness of Waugh. A joy -- Zadie Smith, Harpers
One of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade -- Michael Chabon, LA Times

Author Bio

Edward St Aubyn's superbly acclaimed Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006) and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, Lost for Words and Dunbar.