Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields and fields of victory that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Meloy’s first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.
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.Īward winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear sightedness that first endeared her to readers. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together. 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. 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. 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. 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.
‘What distinguishes Meloy is her insistence on old fashioned plot and sensibility… ‘Wonderfully wise beyond the author’s years,’ said the Chicago Tribune. ‘Here is an author who knows how to jump start the reader’s interest,’ raved The New York Times. With her 2002 debut story collection, Half in Love, prizewinning author Maile Meloy drew acclaim from readers and reviewers across the country.
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