Liars and Saints: A Novel [Paperback]

A 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. “Each chapter…has the seductive aura of a finely crafted story.Liars and Saintsis instructive and bittersweet and yet somehow never nostalgic” (Los Angeles Times).

Set in California,Liars and Saintsfollows 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 Saintsis 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. “Meloy may be the first great American realist of the twenty-first century: The Santerres aren’t real but they feel like they are, and the reader will not soon forget them” (The Boston Globe).Chapter One

They were married during the war, in Santa Barbara, after Mass one morning in the old Mission church. Teddy was solemn; he took the Mass very seriously. Yvette, in a veiled hat and an ivory dress that wasn't a gown, was distracted by the idea that she was in California, without her father there to give her away, and she was about to change her life and her name. I, Yvette Grenier, take you, Theodore Santerre... It all sounded formal and strange, as if someone else were saying the words, until she realized with surprise that it was her.

It was a quick wedding so Teddy could ship out, but they went two days later to a dance at the beach club, where she met Teddy's commanding officer at the bar.

You can't leave this girl so soon, the offló(