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.