Edward St Aubyn to rework King Lear in the Hogarth Shakespeare series

Edward St Aubyn, who laid bare the cruelties of his own father in his autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, is due to take on another tyrannical patriarch: King Lear.

The English novelist is the latest to sign up to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, in which authors from Jeanette Winterson to Gillian Flynn reimagine the plays of Shakespeare. St Aubyn, said senior editor Juliet Brooke, is “a master at portraying the fault lines in family relationships with caustic precision”, so “who better to take on the ultimate family tragedy” of King Lear?

Alexis Washam at Hogarth US added that St Aubyn’s “razor-sharp psychological insight and unsparing wit” were “perfectly suited to a retelling of the timeless King Lear”. In his five Melrose novels, St Aubyn writes of how, aged five, Patrick Melrose was raped by his father, of his years as a drug addict, and of the deaths of both his parents. The series was critically acclaimed as a whole; the fourth, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for the Booker prize.

The Shakespeare series launches this October with Winterson’s take on The Winter’s Tale, The Gap of Time. In 2016, Hogarth will release Howard Jacobson’s reimagining of The Merchant of Venice, titled A Wilderness of Monkeys, Anne Tyler’s version of The Taming of the Shrew, Vinegar Girl, and Margaret Atwood’s look at The Tempest.

Shakespeare’s tragedies, meanwhile, have been taken on by a mix of literary and thriller authors, with Tracy Chevalier picking up Othello, Gone Girl writer Flynn working on Hamlet, and Norwegian bestseller Jo Nesbø doing Macbeth. Commenting on his choice of play last year, Nesbø said: “A thriller about the struggle for power, set both in a gloomy, stormy crime noir-like setting and in a dark, paranoid human mind. A main character who has the moral code and the corrupted mind, the personal strength and the emotional weakness, the ambition and the doubts to go either way … No, it does not feel too far from home.” Flynn has said that Hamlet has “long been a fascination of mine: murder, betrayal, revenge, deceit, madness – all my favourite things”, adding, “What (slightly cheeky) writer wouldn’t be tempted to reimagine it?”

With St Aubyn set for Lear, Shakespeare’s tale of a misguided king and father, a “man more sinned against than sinning” whose lack of understanding leads to disaster, there are now eight authors commissioned to write novels for the project. The books, says the publisher, part of the Random House Group, “will be true to the spirit of the original plays, while giving authors an exciting opportunity to do something new”. They are the latest in a series of reimaginings of classic texts, following takes on Jane Austen by authors including Val McDermid and Joanna Trollope.