The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels - Edward St. Aubyn

Category: Adults, Contemporary, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Abuse Addiction At Last Bad News dark humor Mother's Milk never mind Some Hope

Written by Edward St. Aubyn
Read by Alex Jennings
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Total Length: 27 hrs
Publisher: Macmillan Audio

By turns harrowing and hilarious, this ambitious novel cycle dissects the English upper class. Edward St. Aubyn offers his reader the often darkly funny and self-loathing world of privilege as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story of abuse, addiction, and recovery from the age of five into early middle age.

Never Mind – tracks 01 - 04
Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
Release date: 08-01-13

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.
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Bad News –tracks 05 - 09
Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
Release date: 09-12-13

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father’s ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge - desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Some Hope – tacks 10 – part of 14
Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
Release date: 10-10-13

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

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Mother’s Milk – part of 14 - 20
Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
Release date: 11-07-13

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.
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At Last – tracks 21 - 25
Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
Release date: 12-10-13

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.

This is from Overdrive so InAudible will chapter it easily.