Lives of the Saints

A tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. This novel follows Louise Brown as she returns home after four years of college in New England and finds herself reimmersed in New Orleans society's "wastrel-youth contingent." At the center of it all is Claude, rumpled, accident prone, and desperate; the only man who can break Louise's heart "into a million pieces on the floor." Lives of the Saints elegiacally and eccentrically inscribes the South's hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, marking Nancy Lemann a rising literary star with her debut novel.