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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 reimmersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fueled 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.”
Nancy Lemann was born in New Orleans and is the author of six books, including The Ritz of the Bayou (republished in 2026 by Hub City Press), Malaise, and, most recently, The Oyster Diaries (published in 2026 by New York Review Books).
Lives of the Saints will be 25% off through November! Join us at the shop on November 18 at 7pm for beer, wine, snacks, and book discussion.
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So & So Books, 704 N Person St, Raleigh, NC 27604-1216, United States
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