Mother's Milk

"[An] elegant and witty satire on the dissatisfactions of family life . . . told in a fresh, acerbic way." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Now a five-part Showtime series Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner


Man Booker–shortlisted Mother's Milk, the fourth installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, sees Patrick as a lawyer, married, with a five-year-old child and another on the way.


The novel shifts points of view from Patrick—furious over his mother's decision to sell their mansion in the South of France to a ridiculous New Age hippie—to Patrick's wife, overburdened by motherhood, to Patrick's mother, growing senile and despondent, and even to Patrick's young son Robert, who reflects with hilarious and disturbing clarity on the moments of his birth.


"Vividly captures how the family members' roles shift with the birth of the second son and the deterioration of Patrick's mother." —The New Yorker
Praise for the Patrick Melrose series

"A masterwork for the twenty-first century." —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

"Gorgeous, golden prose." —Lev Grossman, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Magician

"On every page of St. Aubyn's work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension." —James Wood, The New Yorker

"A portrait of a man that feels more alive and true than nearly any I can think of in literature." —Ann Patchett, The Guardian

"Brilliant." —Bret Easton Ellis


"Intoxicatingly witty." —The New York Review of Books