Lives of the Saints: A Novel (Voices of the South) - Softcover

Lemann, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807121622 ISBN 13: 9780807121627

Publisher: LSU Press, 1997

Synopsis

Claude Collier made the world seem kind,” says Louise Brown, -beginning a tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. Returning home after four years of college in New England (“Among the Yankees I have known,” she says, “I only met one who had the grace to apologize to me about the War”), Louise bemusedly finds herself reimmersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fueled hurricane is Claude, rumpled, accident prone, supremely sweet―and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus; for Louise, Claude is the only man who can break her heart “into a million pieces on the floor.”

By turns elegiac and eccentric, inscribing the South’s hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, Lives of the Saints is the debut novel that marked Nancy Lemann as a rising literary star.

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy Lemann is also the author of Sportsman’s Paradise, a novel, and The Ritz of the Bayou, an account of the trials of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. Her work has been featured in Esquire, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Observer. Born in New Orleans, she now lives in San Diego.

Review:

Hysterically funny, beautifully written. . . . Warming and endearing, brilliant. (Anne Tyler The New Republic)

Spikily comic. . . . This is how Blanche DuBois talked before the lampshade was torn away and life became lit with a naked bulb. (James Wolcott New York Review of Books)

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0807121622
• ISBN 13: 9780807121627
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160