Extraordinary -- Sam Mendes If something has kept you from reading this great novel in five parts, let it keep you no more . . . the experience of St Aubyn is indelible -- Jonathan Franzen I've loved Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now -- David Nicholls At once epic and intimate, appalling and comic, the Melrose novels are masterpieces -- Maggie O'Farrell Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St Aubyn * Brett Easton Ellis * Humour, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, by one of our greatest prose stylists * Alice Sebold * Edward St Aubyn is among the handful of the current giants of English fiction * Edmund White * Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation -- Alan Hollinghurst The wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse, the waspishness of Waugh. A joy -- Zadie Smith 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 *