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Liars and Saints

By Maile Meloy

(5)

| Hardcover | 9780743244350

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Book Description

With her 2002 debut story collection, Half in Love, prizewinning author Maile Meloy drew acclaim from readers and reviewers across the country. "Here is an author who knows how to jump-start the reader's interest," raved The New York Times. "Wonderfully wise beyond the author's yearContinue

With her 2002 debut story collection, Half in Love, prizewinning author Maile Meloy drew acclaim from readers and reviewers across the country. "Here is an author who knows how to jump-start the reader's interest," raved The New York Times. "Wonderfully wise beyond the author's years," said the Chicago Tribune. "What distinguishes Meloy is her insistence on old-fashioned plot and sensibility....Maile Meloy is a truly compelling discovery."

With her first novel, Liars and Saints, Meloy more than delivers on the promise of her earlier work. This richly textured, emotionally charged novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceits 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, as they navigate a succession of life-altering events -- through the submerged emotion of the fifties, the recklessness and excess of the sixties and seventies, and the reckonings of the eighties and nineties. In a family driven by jealousy and propriety as much as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation, and fiercely protected secrets gradually drive the Santerres apart. 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.

Critics

  • Off the boil

    Liars and Saints Maile Meloy 260pp, John Murray, £14.99 As one of six books picked out as good summer reads by Richard and Judy's book club, Maile Meloy's debut is poised to benefit from the magic touch of television. It's not hard to see why it was ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Liars and Saints By Maile Meloy

    Author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Half in Love, Maile Meloy now tries her hand at writing a complex multi-generational novel. Liars and Saints has the lively feel of a Catholic soap opera in fast-forward, following the Santerr ... (read full critics)

    bookpage published on Tue, 14 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  • 1 person find this helpful

    Quite good

    No flowery language here. The book is written in a clear-cut concise way. It sometimes reads as a synopsis, which makes it all the more interesting because you can fill in the emotional awkward bits yourself. Generally I'm a big fan of books that span generations and have a few skeletons tumbling ou ... (continue)

    No flowery language here. The book is written in a clear-cut concise way. It sometimes reads as a synopsis, which makes it all the more interesting because you can fill in the emotional awkward bits yourself. Generally I'm a big fan of books that span generations and have a few skeletons tumbling out of closets, but this one failed to grab me. Quite good, no better than that.

    Is this helpful?

    annemarie said on Dec 31, 2006 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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9780743244350 Hardcover $24.00 $20.52 bn.com
-- $10.99 ebooks.com
$24.00 $23.50 The Book Depository
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