Friday, January 4, 2019

The best books about new beginnings

Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun: A Memoir.

At the Guardian she tagged some favorite books about new beginnings, including:
I only came to the Patrick Melrose novels, the first of which were published in the 1990s, after watching the excellent 2018 TV adaptation, but Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn is brilliant: he has such a singular voice – terrifying and piercingly funny. I’m fascinated with the shadows that childhood can cast, explored in this case through the abuse of Melrose, a cipher for St Aubyn. It shows how the building blocks of a personality are laid and has an unbeatable ear for the particular wrong-headed attitudes and monstrous characters of its upper-class setting – laced with a complicated affection for them.
Read about the other entries on the list.

David Melrose in Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn made the Telegraph's collection of the ten worst dads in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue