With her first novel, <I>Liars and Saints,</I> award-winning author Maile Meloy more than delivers on the promise of her highly acclaimed debut story collection, <I>Half in Love.</I> 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, <I>Liars and Saints</I> 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, <I>Liars and Saints</I> 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.