THE FIRST PATRICK MELROSE NOVEL At his mother's family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests' arrival tear Patrick's world in two. '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 '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, Harpers 'St Aubyn's prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. One of the finest writers of his generation' The Times