mother's milk reviews

‘Bafflingly denied the top prize at last year’s Booker, this is a must read:  sharp and big-hearted, for all the bleakness’ Evening Standard

‘ The author…remains among the cream of British novelists’ Sunday Times

‘Edward St Aubyn’s quiet masterpiece Mother’s Milk narrowly missed out on the Booker this year. Out in paperback on Friday this beautifully written novel casts a forensic – not to mention bitter – eye on mother-child relations and on middle-aged dread. A must-read.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Edward St Aubyn’s self-lacerating, Tamazepam-guzzling follow-up to his Some Hope trilogy was a small triumph, and should have won the Booker’  Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

‘My favourite novel this year… It’s witty but charitable, smart but oddly kind – dark chocolate as opposed to the milk we’ve become accustomed to.’ Fay Weldon, Sunday Express

‘Edward St Aubyn was shortlisted for this year’s Booker because he combines an effortless, clever elegance with pitch-black humour and total immersion in the drama of the human heart.  It is ludicrous that Mother’s Milk, a great side of beef of a novel, didn’t win.  It is rich and bloody and English and everyone I know who’s read it joins me in asking why St Aubyn is not the world’s most famous man’  Melissa Katsoulis, Sunday Telegraph

‘Funny…. Wonderful…Edward St Aubyn is a class act’ D.J. Taylor, Spectator

‘A huge revelation… It’s the darkest possible comedy about the cruelty of the old to the young, vicious and excruciatingly honest. It opened my eyes to a whole realm of experience I have never seen written about. That’s the mark of a masterpiece.’ Vanora Bennett, The Times

‘Family holidays over four summers – three in the south of France, one touring America – give Edward St Aubyn the settings for his latest exercise in the comedy of exasperation.  With darker issues periodically surfacing, his novel – spiking its immaculate prose with lethal satire – is caustically hilarious about a broad span of targets, from rampant obesity in the United States to rapacious new-age soulfulness’  Peter Kemp, Sunday Times ‘Books of the Year’

‘Mother’s Milk is so good – so fantastically well-written, profound and humane… Its minute-by-minute interior monologues, its foetid, man-in-a-crisis confusions bring Updike to mind, while its social set-pieces, its brittle, poised dialogue, are as fine as anything in the work of his friend, Alan Hollinghurst.  But there is also a new sweetness here, and at times, particularly when he is writing about children, it is heart-stopping’  Observer

‘2006 opens with a welcome return:  Edward St Aubyn adds a 21st-century coda to his 1990s trilogy, Some Hope, with the beautifully written Mother’s Milk, which revisits the dysfunctional Melrose family to illuminate the very old, the very young and the middle-aged raging in between.  Polished yet profound, it’s even better than his previous work, and that’s saying something’  Guardian

‘In the early 1990s Edward St Aubyn published – to great acclaim – three novellas detailing the degenerate exploits of Patrick Melrose and his cruel aristocratic family.  Now a long-awaited follow-up, Mother’s Milk, and a new edition of the trilogy, reminds us of what we’ve been missing…
St Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart.  He intelligently contrasts Patrick’s spiritual redemption with the self-help cant of his mother’s guru, reminding us that sorting out childhood issues, finding peace through communing with nature and resolving to live better lives are not embarrassingly middle-class fetishes, but useful things for us all to do’  The Times

‘Reminiscent of John Updike and Iris Murdoch by turns, the resulting comedy of manners, morals and existential angst is bitingly satirical and unfailingly entertaining’  Daily Mail

‘St Aubyn is admired by connoisseurs of good writing who relish his formal prose and fine metaphors as well as his portraits of the nasty rich.  In fact, what is remarkable about his novels is that while they do not let anybody off the hook, the precision of the writing and the bleakness of the vision do not exclude warmer feelings, and this restricted and somewhat weird fictional world comes to have a wider sympathetic meaning’  Sunday Times

‘It's nice to meet up with old friends at this time of year, especially if we haven't seen them for quite a while. Welcome back, then, Patrick Melrose, whom we left in 1994, at the end of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose Trilogy, having some kind of epiphany in the snow after a particularly savage upper-class party. ('Vicious creatures,' says Patrick of the swans he glimpses on the darkened lake, but he's talking about his own circle as well.) The trilogy is republished in paperback by Picador in January, in one volume entitled Some Hope. And, joy of joys, there's a new instalment in hardback.

Anyone who remembers Patrick's relationship with his wet and wealthy mother Eleanor will feel queasy on hearing that the new novel is called Mother's Milk. In St Aubyn's hands, that bland, benign-sounding title is weighted down with dread and hatred. Patrick is now miserably married, the loving yet somehow unwilling father of two small boys. Can he stop himself repeating the failures of his own parents? Can he heal his own damaged psyche? It's difficult to think of anyone who writes better about children and married life  and St Aubyn is desperately, despairingly witty, too.

In a market where the dullest writers are routinely described as 'wickedly funny', he's the real thing.’ Independent on Sunday

‘Patrick's plight is depicted with such lucidity that it becomes universal. We may most of us escape actual child abuse, near-fatal heroin addiction, over-weening snobbery, and a sense of entitlement to grand houses and a life of unearned self-indulgence, but the impossibility of breaking free from our past is common. It's not a word this author may ever have expected as praise.’ Evening Standard

‘Mother’s Milk has the cerebral excitement and piercing funniness of St Aubyn at his brilliant best.’ Tatler

‘These books are hilarious and terrifying, shot through with pain and wisdom and written in the most extraordinary cold, pure style: rockets of wit exploding like flares to highlight the bleakness of the terrain’ Independent on Sunday

‘Clearly the author is well named.  Because St Aubyn does indeed write like a saint, even when depicting the most sinful of activities.  Mother's Milk is an amusing, moving, sophisticated and beautifully well-considered slice of fiction that proves conclusively that here is a creator who stands amongst the cream of English novelists’ Sunday Mercury

'Beneath the veneer of satire and the mocking tone, St Aubyn expresses wonderfully the unhappiness of a family whose past is ever-present’ Sunday Herald

'wonderful caustic wit… At its best – and most of the time this closely worked, sparkling novel is at its best – we are grateful that so much wit and attentiveness has been lavished on these slightly spoiled darlings and their navel-gazing offspring.  Perhaps the very sprightliness of the prose – its lapidary concision and moral certitude – represents the cure for which the characters yearn.  So much good writing is in itself a form of health’  Guardian

‘The first new novel that I read this year is still the best by so far:  Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, a beautifully written account of what it means to be a father when your own childhood was irredeemably awful.  It’s powerful and gripping and he writes children brilliantly’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘A witty, perceptive and complex family portrait that examines the shifting allegiances between generations… An up-to-the-minute dissection of the mores or child-rearing, marriage, adultery and assisted suicide, Mother’s Milk showcases St Aubyn’s luminous and acidic prose, as well as his masterful ability to combine the most excruciating emotional pain with the driest comedy’  Herald Express

‘If you read no one else this summer, read Edward St Aubyn… Think Evelyn Waugh crossed with Bret Easton Ellis and you’ll have some idea just how funny and painfully truthful he can be.  Earlier this year, the fourth in the series, Mother’s Milk belatedly appeared and I went back and read all four Melrose novels at a gallop.  How are writers as good as St Aubyn allowed to drop off the radar?  Dialogue is his forte and the legions or rookie writers on creative writing courses, where you can’t hear yourself think of the sound of mutual back-slapping, would do better to chuck them and study his technique.  It is a joy to behold’  Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald

‘Pack [Mother’s Milk] with Some Hope. … A brilliantly well-written novel which resonates for a long time’  Independent on Sunday

‘The Inheritance of Loss… was not the book I loved the best.  That was Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, a fantastically funny, humane and serious novel about the destructive influence of parents upon their children, and the possibility of escaping it.  It was also the most beautifully written of all the books I read’  Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph

‘St Aubyn’s books are so precise and crystalline that not a sentence needs editing.  Like a finely cut diamond, they shimmer with clarity, comedy and poignancy.  At last, St Aubyn’s talent has been recognised.  He didn’t win the Man Booker prize this week but his latest book, Mother’s Milk, made it on to the shortlist and is now no.33 on Amazon’s sales list [having been much higher].  Not before time, I say’ Mary Ann Sieghart, The Times

‘My favourite novel was Edward St Aubyn’s brilliantly funny and moving Mother’s Milk; it should have won the Booker, and I can’t understand why it didn’t’  Rachel Cooke, Evening Standard

‘Mother’s Milk… is extremely sharp, wise, touching and very funny - like all his books’  The Guardian

‘Darkly comic… As a prose stylist, there are few to match him in recent fiction, and this absorbing novel shows him at the height of his powers’ The Times

‘Shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, Mother’s Milk could well prove a breakthrough novel for Edward St Aubyn, a supremely polished stylist who has often been eclipsed by showier talents…The portrait of a dysfunctional upper-class family rings true in every particular… It is the dry humour underpinning the inch-perfect [sic] human observation which makes the writing so entertaining’  Sunday Telegraph

‘St Aubyn’s writing is spare, witty and original’  Wallpaper

‘In this novel, which many sound judges thought should have won last year's Booker Prize, Edward St Aubyn returns to the dysfunctional Melrose family and their ne'er-do-well son Patrick to craft a poignant tale of squandered inheritances and squandered affections’ www.thefirstpost.co.uk