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

Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope

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

By: Edward St Aubyn

Narrated by: Alex Jennings

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About this listen

Read by actor Alex Jennings, Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series, filmed for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, 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.

Biographical Fiction

Coming of Age

Dark Humour

Family Life

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins

Biography

Funny

Heartfelt

Witty

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Critic reviews

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

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

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)

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)

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)

Clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny (David Sexton)

Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic (Mariella Frostrup)

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)

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

Most relevant

Distressing read, and populated entirely by awful people. The second and third books that I listened to improved, with dry humour. I shan't read the remaining books in the series.