Bad News
03 April 2025Synopsis
‘I’ve loved Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now’ - David Nicholls
Bad News is the second of Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the aristocratic addict, Patrick.
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.
Bad News was originally published, along with Never Mind and Some Hope, as part of a three-book omnibus also called Some Hope.
‘The Melrose novels are remarkable – ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written’ - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
Details
03 April 2025
9781035063741Reviews
I've loved Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, nowDavid Nicholls
Our purest living prose stylistThe Guardian
St Aubyn conveys the chaos of emotion, the confusion of heightened sensation, and the daunting contradictions of intellectual endeavour with a force and subtlety that have an exhilarating, almost therapeutic effectFrancis Wyndham, New York Review of Books
The Melrose novels are remarkable – ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written. A brilliantly controlled story of a life sent out of controlPeter Kemp, Sunday Times
