Never Mind
Edward St Aubyn
1992 Winner
Betty Trask Award
12 April 2012
9781447205401Synopsis
Winner of the Betty Trask Award, Never Mind is the first in Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, Patrick.
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.
Never Mind was originally published, along with Bad News and Some Hope, as part of a three book omnibus , also called Some Hope.
‘The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny’ David Sexton, Evening Standard
'Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation' Alan Hollinghurst
‘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
