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Liars and Saints: A Novel

by Maile Meloy

Liars and Saints: A Novel Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

With her first novel, Liars and Saints, award-winning author Maile Meloy more than delivers on the promise of her highly acclaimed debut story collection, Half in Love. This richly textured novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships.

Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together.

By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Liars and Saints is a masterful display of Maile Meloy's prodigious gifts and of her penetrating insight into an extraordinary American family and into the nature of human love.

Review:

"Liars and Saints is a surehanded little first-novel by a sly, knowledgeable, no-nonsense young writer who will not permit herself a single exaggeration but who nonetheless packs quite a punch. It is a surehanded little first-novel that, for all its brevity, happens to disclose half a century of a middle-class Catholic family's disappointed expectations. The quiet, unastonished precision with which Maile Meloy depicts the extent to which everything now goes haywire in so-called ordinary American life is an impressive achievement, literary and otherwise." Philip Roth

Review:

"In this exquisitely rendered novel, Meloy brings her incisive intelligence to the page once again, reminding us that our actions and inactions, admissions and omissions, travel from one generation to the next, and that our past travels with us." Elizabeth Strout, Author of Amy and Isabelle

Review:

"A multigenerational first novel told with remarkable compression and precision." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"The alternating points of view of eight main characters shine with authenticity....The rich emotional chiarascuro and fine psychological insight of this haunting novel mark Meloy as a writer of extraordinary talent." Publishers Weekly, starred review

Review:

"Meloy follows four tangled generations of the Santerre family, French Canadian Catholics who settle in Southern California during World War II. That sounds like a saga, yet the book is only 260 pages long — and yet again you don't feel you've missed a thing." The New York Times

Review:

[E]ngaging but slapdash first novel...In Liars and Saints, Meloy has so much time and biology to keep track of that her crisp writing goes slack and generic in quite a number of places....My sense of Meloy's talents makes me think she'd be wiser to write next about six months in Montana instead of fifty years in and out of California. She's a good writer, but I'm agnostic as to whether she's a novelist." Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)

Review:

"A multigenerational first novel told with remarkable compression and precision....Prizewinning storyteller Meloy pushes every melodramatic hot button with disarming understatement." Kirkus

Review:

"[A] spectacular first novel...." New York Times Book Review

Synopsis:

The prize-winning young author of a critically acclaimed short story collection makes her full-length fiction debut in this richly textured, emotionally charged novel about four generations of an American family.

About the Author

Maile Meloy's short story collection, Half in Love, was a New York Times Notable Book in 2002. She won the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for best story in The Paris Review. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and Best New American Voices and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. She lives in California.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780743261982
Other:
Meloy, Maile
Publisher:
Scribner Book Company
Other:
Meloy, Maile
Author:
Meloy, Maile
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Historical - General
Subject:
Sagas
Subject:
General Fiction
Copyright:
Edition Description:
B102
Publication Date:
July 2004
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
272
Dimensions:
8.12x5.28x.60 in. .51 lbs.

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