Books by Edward St Aubyn
Lost for Words: A Novel
by Edward St Aubyn
🏆 Winner of the 2014 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Edward St. Aubyn's satire on the pretentious world of literary prizes represents a departure for the novelist, best known for his shocking, semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels. Widely received as a revenge novel, after the final novel of that series, At Last, failed to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize—something St. Aubyn brusquely denies—it has received mixed reviews. Expect "sly, chatty third-person narration," explains The Guardian, and a "constant onslaught of wordplay, bathos, farcical mishap and circular logic."
Parallel Lines
by Edward St Aubyn
‘The Ministry of Truth is now tightening its grip by the hour,’ comments one character in Edward St. Aubyn’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel that brilliantly uses the conventions of farce, satire and social critique to evoke a nation drifting indifferently into chaos. Written in riotously creative language, St. Aubyn’s portrait of the family and its sharp-edged sketches of various institutions of British life are often very, very funny and always penetrating; but they are also at times moving, especially when they relate to mental health. Parallel Lines, which never seems parochial despite its apparently insular metropolitan setting, reinvents the so-called Hampstead novel with formal verve and political vitality.
“The central character is struggling with all sorts of problems that relate to his own early care and at the same time he is a father with a wife and small child and there are parts where he discusses the fact that the mother of his child is up against a culture which is really hostile to the provision of good care.” Read more...
The best books on Why We Live in a Mad World
Oliver James, Psychologist
Interviews where books by Edward St Aubyn were recommended
The best books on Why We Live in a Mad World, recommended by Oliver James
The psychologist and trustee of Alzheimer’s charity SPECAL says British and American women today are 5 times more likely to suffer a mental illness than in the 1950s
The Best Political Novels of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
From a book based on the actual love letters a British prime minister sent to his mistress in the run-up to World War I, to a fantastical tale that takes its cue from the Epic of Gilgamesh, there’s a wide variety of novels to choose from on the shortlist of this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. The comments are from the judging panel, chaired this year by British novelist Jim Crace.
The Funniest Books of the 21st Century
This year, to mark its 25th anniversary, the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction declared Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian to be their ‘winner of winners’, that is: the funniest book of the last twenty-five years. We asked comedian Tatty Macleod, one of the judges, about the process of sifting through their longlist of the previous winners.
