LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006.
The novel’s perspective ricochets among all members of the Melrose family – the family featured in St. Aubyn’s Melrose series that began with Never Mind – starting with Robert, who provides an exceptionally droll and compelling account of being born; to Patrick, a hilariously churlish husband who has been sexually abandoned by his wife in favour of his sons; to Mary, who’s consumed by her children and an overwhelming desire not to repeat the mistakes of her own mother. All the while, St. Aubyn examines the web of false promises that entangle this once-illustrious family whose last vestige of wealth – an old house in the south of France – is about to be donated by Patrick’s mother to a New Age foundation.
An up-to-the-minute dissection of the mores of child-rearing, marriage, adultery and assisted suicide, Mother’s Milk showcases Edward St. Aubyn’s luminous and acidic prose – and his masterful ability to combine the most excruciating emotional pain with the driest comedy. Absorb Mother's Milk into your and bloodstream and postnatal depression will never seem the same again . . .
Never Mind (the first Melrose)
Bad News (Melrose 2)
Some Hope (Melrose 3)
Mother's Milk (Melrose 4)
At Last (the last Melrose)
LoveReading
Find This Book In
About
Mother's Milk Synopsis
THE FOURTH PATRICK MELROSE NOVEL The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age foundation, and his young son Robert understanding far more than he should. But even as the family struggles against the pull of its ever-present past, a new generation brings a new tenderness, and the possibility of change. 'The bravura quality of St Aubyn's performance is irresistible. Brilliant' Sunday Telegraph 'Mother's Milk has the cerebral excitement and piercing funniness of St Aubyn at his brilliant best' Tatler 'The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction' Evening Standard 'St Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart' The Times
About This Edition
Press Reviews
Edward St. Aubyn Press Reviews
Praise for the Patrick Melrose novels:
'So good so fantastically well written, profound and humane ... it is heartstopping'
Rachel Cooke, Observer
'The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century' Alice Sebold
Author
About Edward St. Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He is the author of seven novels, the most recent of which is At Last, the final volume in his Melrose series of novels. The others are 'Never Mind' (winner of the Betty Trask Award), 'Bad News', 'Mother’s Milk' (shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and the 2007 South Bank Show Award for Literature). Edward St Aubyn's other novels are 'On the Edge' (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize) and 'A Clue to the Exit'.
Author photo © Timothy Allen
More About Edward St. Aubyn