Bad News

Ive loved Edward St Aubyns Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all, now - David Nicholls Bad News is the second of Edward St Aubyns semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the aristocratic addict, Patrick. Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his fathers ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patricks remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past. Bad News was originally published, along with Never Mind and Some Hope, as part of a three-book omnibus also called Some Hope. The Melrose novels are remarkable ferociously funny, painfully acute and exhilaratingly written - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times