At Last - Couverture rigide

'At last! At Last by Edward St Aubyn is finally here from Picador - the long-awaited conclusion to the shocking and elegant Melrose series by the Man Booker-shortlisted expert on drugs and the aristocracy. Heady prose and poetic heart' --Sunday Telegraph's preview of best books for 2011

'Edward St Aubyn's At Last sees the conclusion of his acclaimed Patrick Melrose series that included Booker nominated Mother's Milk - I'm a huge fan of his dark imagination and satirical humour' --Mariella Frostrup, Stylist magazine

'Both blackly funny and unbearably painful to read in places, it's an extraordinary novel.' --Bookseller

'Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and, although it did not win as it plainly should have done, it did garner St Aubyn a mass readership. This week, he publishes a fifth and apparently final book in the sequence, which is now clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction... the books succeed in making their very particular material - child abuse in a stratospherically upper-class milieu - into a form of truth-telling for everybody... stingingly well written and exhilaratingly funny.' --David Sexton, Evening Standard

'Funeral rites dominate At Last, the concluding work in Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical sequence of ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written novels about his fictional alter ego, Patrick Melrose... As in all the novels, exploration of Patrick's inner turmoil coexists with stylishly choreographed scenes of mordantly enjoyable social comedy -- here as jet black as the outfits worn by some of the curiously assorted mourners at the crematorium... The funeral is alive with satiric potential. And St Aubyn unleashes it to zestfully hilarious effect. Irony courses through these pages like adrenaline... Patrick's intelligence processes his predicaments into elegant, lucid, dispassionate, near-aphoristic formulations... Brimming with witty flair, sardonic perceptiveness and literary finesse, At Last brings a remarkable fictional enterprise -- a brilliantly controlled story of a life sent out of control -- to a winning culmination.' --Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

'A writer who admits to having suffered extreme parental cruelty has three choices: write a misery memoir, write an autobiographical novel, or shy away from exploring the pain and get a job in a bank. Thankfully for the growing number of readers who consider Edward St Aubyn to be one of the finest writers of his generation, the author of Mother's Milk went for option B. His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit -- whether turned against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack dealers -- is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether over the grand scale of three volumes or within a single page of anecdote, he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat... Only at the end do you sense that the ground has shifted as our hero -- finally freed from the father who abused him and the mother who, also abused, abandoned him -- has changed his mind and decided to live for the family that he has made instead of the one that made him. At last. A happy ending? If this is indeed the final Melrose book, then happy indeed. If, as St Aubyn's fans will be hoping, Patrick comes out of retirement for one last job, well then -- anything could happen.' --Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

'At Last! At last! Let the bells ring out, for here is the long-awaited and brilliant culmination of the Melrose family saga... Brutally funny... This can be read as a standalone novel and those unfamiliar with St Aubyn's --Psychologies magazine

'I've been saving Edward St Aubyn s At Last for a time when I can properly savour it: his books don t come along often enough for my liking, but they do combine prose of enormous grace, precision and beauty with the kind of anarchic comic sense that makes one snort and giggle in public' Tim Martin
'I've been saving up At Last by the brilliant Edward St Aubyn. His previous Melrose novel, Mother's Milk, is one of the most stunning meditations on familial relationships I've ever read' Julie Myerson
'I am eager to get stuck into the climax of Edward St Aubyn's hilarious series of novels chronicling the life and times of Patrick Melrose' Michael Gove --Daily Telegraph Summer Reading

For Patrick Melrose, family is more than a double-edged sword. As friends, relations and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor an heiress who forsook the grandeur of her upbringing for good works , freely bestowed upon everyone but her own child Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn t necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined.

Yet as the service ends and the family gather for a final party, as conversations are overheard, danced around and concertedly avoided, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current. And at the end of the day, alone in his rooftop bedsit, it seems to promise some form of safety, at last.

One of the most powerful reflections on pain and acceptance, and the treacheries of family, ever written, At Last is the brilliant culmination of the Melrose books. It is a masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional truth.