“Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts.”
Patrick McGrath
“Murray captures the fleeting joys and lasting sorrows of adolescence perfectly”
Emma Donoghue
This mouth-watering double bill presents two of the sharpest, funniest satirists writing today. Edward St Aubyn is one of Britain’s finest prose stylists. Over twenty years, his five Melrose novels (including the Booker-nominated Mother’s Milk) chronicled the traumatic life of his alter ego, Patrick Melrose, from birth to middle age, with caustic wit and an unflinching instinct for truth, and he brings those same qualities to his new novel, Lost for Words, a razor-sharp satire set amid the desperate writers and backstabbing judges of a fictional literary prize, the Elysian Award. Paul Murray’s debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award, but it was his second novel, Skippy Dies, that propelled him to the forefront of a new generation of Irish writers. Described by Eileen Battersby as “the most assured Irish comic novel since At Swim-Two-Birds,” Skippy Dies traced the epic, tragic-comic and uproarious adventures of overweight maths genius Ruprecht Van Doren and his doomed roommate at Dublin’s Seabrook College for Boys.