Having watched the exquisite series with Benedict Cumberbatch, I decided to give the small 5 novels a read: Patrick Melrose is a man who has been born into privilege, but with all this good fortune, his life is not as simple as you might think. With an abusive father and a mother who turns a blind eye to the abuse, Patrick’s life spirals out of controls. Patrick suffers drug addiction and substance abuse, but can he turn his life around and find his salvation? This book set is ideal for young adults who are fans of contemporary fiction and the TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Description :

Never Mind
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. Trigger warning: child sexual abuse.

It made me really, really angry as I was reading that the mother was ok to look the other way and only some of the guests seemed interested as to why this young, quiet kid would be so afraid of his father.

Then again, the lives of the rich are always a bit mysterious.

Bad News

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father’s ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s 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 bod and mind to the very edge – desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Some Hope

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from savageries of his childhood?

Mother’s Milk

The once illustrious, once wealthy Melrose’s are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age foundation and his young son Robert understanding far more than he should. But even as the family struggles against the pull of its ever-present past, a new generation brings new tenderness and the possibility of change.

At Last

As friends, relatives and foes trickle in to pay their final respects to his mother Eleanor, Patrick Melrose finds himself questioning whether a life without parents will be the liberation he has so long imagined. Yet as the memorial service ends and the family gathers one last time, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current: the chance of some sort of safety – at last.