At Last: The Final Patrick Melrose Novel

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year - One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year - Named One of the best books of the Year by The Telegraph and Esquire

Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel.

As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works--Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk--are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined.

The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety...at last.

Author: Edward St Aubyn
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 12/24/2012
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 8.21h x 5.56w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9781250023902

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 02/10/2013 pg. 28
New Yorker (The) 06/02/2014 pg. 43

About the Author

Edward St. Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He is the author of A Clue to the Exit and On the Edge; a series of novels about the Melrose family, including the trilogy Some Hope; and Mother's Milk, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

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