Lives of the Saints

By Nancy Lemann

Book Overview

Fresh out of college in New England, a young woman returns home to New Orleans and is quickly pulled back into the city's "wastrel-youth contingent" in this cult-classic novel of love and decadence, now with a new introduction.

Nancy Lemann's voice is one of the most unusual in American fiction, unabashedly digressive, weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholy, an endless surprise. Hers is a voice born of and at odds with her native New Orleans, a voice that takes on and wonders at the ramshackle realities not just of the deep South but of America. Lives of the Saints, her first book, was a revelation of new talent. Reappearing here, several decades later, it is simply a revelation.

"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. When Louise returns home after four years of college in New England, she bemusedly finds herself re-immersed in New Orleans society's "wastrel-youth contingent." At the center of this gin-fuelled hurricane is Claude Collier, rumpled, accident prone, supremely sweet--and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus; for Louise, Claude is the only man who can cause her heart to "break 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 as tender and moving now as ever.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FGHPMVQ5
• ISBN13: 9798896230281
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 208 Pages

Customer Reviews

Life in New Orleans

This book is beautifully written. It clearly favors slice of life scenes over linear plot. She does a wonderful job of portraying the lives of the eccentric upper class in an eccentric city (New Orleans).

It charmed me

I loved this book (though did have to take a leap of faith and not just get irritated by her beginning words with CAPITAL letters to give them intensity...). It reminded me of the joy I felt as an adolescent reading all the Glass stories by Salinger.

Fabulous read about New Orleans characters

Great writing made the pages of this book fly by! A slim novel with a fast, almost talkative pace, the book was as much about New Orleans and its eccentricities as it was about the two main characters. The Fiery Pantheon (her latest book) is a great read too. Long live (and long write) Nancy Lemann.

Poetic entry into the uniquely bizarre world of New Orleans

Nancy Lemann captures the rythmn and cadence of New Orleans in a marvelous first book. The dawlin' flawed hero and characters come to life with a drama that can barely be borne without your heart breaking or your stomach hurting from laughter. A delight to read and a must for anyone who has fallen in love with the French Quarter or intends to have their heart broken into a million pieces on the floor. I'm stilling searching for a novel to take its place.

Wow

There is more packed into this short novel than many writers pack into a lifetime of writing. Nancy Lehman has created a mini-masterpiece in this tale of yearning for a love that, ultimately, is never expressed to the beloved. This novel is set in New Orleans and, like the Confederacy of Dunces before it, Lives of the Saints draws the reader into a city that is so real it swirls around like the room after a good drunk. Lives of the Saints will make you gasp with delight. Read this book.