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Shop nowLiars and Saints
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Learn moreWith 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 the nature of human love.
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.
Kirsten Potter has won several awards, including more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and been a three-time finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. Her work has been recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and by AudioFile magazine, among many others. She graduated with highest honors from Boston University and has performed on stage and in film and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy.
Reviews
“Maile Meloy writes with both fearlessness and true compassion.”
“A spectacular first novel.”
“Maile Meloy combines the meticulous realism of domestic fiction with the witchery of a natural-born storyteller.”
“Meloy manages to avoid melodrama through the precision and restraint of her writing…She is also a deft sociologist, charting the ways in which the social upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century have gradually reshaped our ideas of family…Meloy’s achievement is to have written one that leaves you wishing it were longer.”
“A tour de force.”
“Remarkable…Bittersweet, wise, with a fantastic sense of character and history…Fifteen minutes after opening this book, a reader is apt not just to care about the Santerres but also to feel like one of them.”
“The consolations of ardent faith, as well as the harsh demands of religious dogma, supply the leitmotifs of this dazzling novel of a Catholic family’s life over five decades. Meloy, whose collection of short fiction, Half in Love, earned rave reviews…writes with wisdom and compassion about the secret guilt that shadows three generations of the Santerre family…The alternating points of view of eight main characters shine with authenticity and illuminate the moral complexities felt by each generation. The rich emotional chiarascuro and fine psychological insight of this haunting novel mark Meloy as a writer of extraordinary talent.”
“Meloy is an outstanding short story writer, as evident in her collection, Half in Love (2002), and her signature clarity and concreteness also grace her first novel…[Meloy] deftly probes the parameters of faith and love.”
“A multigenerational first novel told with remarkable compression and precision.”
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