NATIONAL BESTSELLER An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year "The Melrose Novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England." ―Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones Soon to be a Showtime TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels― Never Mind , Bad News , Some Hope , and Mother's Milk , a Man Booker finalist―to coincide with the publication of At Last , the final installment of this unique novel cycle. By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose's story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind , the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family's chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father's ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope , offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother's Milk , returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother's desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty―welcome to the declining British aristocracy. This volume introduces American readers to the first four Melrose novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk—published in Great Britian from 1992 to 2006. (The fifth book, At Last, is available as a separate volume.) In Never Mind, Patrick is five years old, living in Provence with his incredibly rich American mother, Eleanor, and his sadistic, abusive English father, David. In Bad News, Patrick, now 22, goes to New York to collect David’s ashes, and there he feeds his addiction to various drugs in a spectacular fashion, spending over $10,000 in the course of a single day. If Bad News calls to mind Bright Lights, Big City, Some Hope is more like Wodehouse, with Patrick, now sober, attending a country-house party at which Princess Margaret is also a guest. Mother’s Milk returns to Provence, where Patrick is vacationing with his wife and sons in the house that Eleanor has turned into a New Age wellness center. Mother’s Milk was a Man Booker finalist, making this volume especially welcome for readers who savor literary British fiction. --Mary Ellen Quinn A brew of romans a clef set amid a sparklingly decadent upper-crust English background, the novels are a mordant portrait of a class that St. Aubyn loathes but is undeniably his own. In each novel we read a kind of status report on Patrick's progress, one in which his growing desire to come to grips with his legacy and the shadow of maturity does battle with a pathological case of self-loathing, an appetite for sex and self-medication. Bleak as the material may sound, the Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy. —Eric Banks “Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch…Patrick often seems like a Philip Roth hero transplanted into a world of English privilege…The Patrick Melrose Series forms an exhaustive study of cruelty: its varieties, its motivations, its consequences, its moral implications…At Last is an intelligent and surprising novel, a fitting conclusion to the one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.” ― The Boston Globe “Implausibly brilliant speech…The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels …This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.” ― James Wood, The New Yorker “Gorgeous, golden prose…St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can't convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can't face it.” ― Lev Grossman, Time “Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidit