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Published Aug 2020
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From Edmund White, a bold and sweeping new novel that traces the extraordinary fates of twin sisters, one destined for Parisian nobility and the other for Catholic sainthood.
Yvette and Yvonne Crawford are twin sisters, born on a humble patch of East Texas prairie but bound for far more dramatic and tragic fates. Just as an untold fortune of oil lies beneath their daddy's land, both girls harbor their own secrets and dreams-ones that will carry them far from Texas and from each other. As the decades unfold, Yvonne will ascend the highest ranks of Parisian society as Yvette gives herself to a lifetime of worship and service in the streets of Jericó, Colombia. And yet, even as they remake themselves in their radically different lives, the twins find that the bonds of family and the past are unbreakable.
Spanning the 1950s to the recent past, Edmund White's marvelous novel serves up an immensely pleasurable epic of two Texas women as their lives traverse varied worlds: the swaggering opulence of the Dallas nouveau riche, the airless pretension of the Paris gratin, and the strict piety of a Colombian convent. For nearly half a century, Edmund White's work has revitalized American literature, blithely breaking down boundaries of class and sexuality, and A Saint From Texas is one of his most joyous, gorgeously written, and piercing works to date.
"[M[esmerizing...Equally tender and salacious, White's deeply satisfying character study demonstrates his profound abilities." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[T]he novel brims with wit and style. Proust meets John Irving in this grand and delightful comedy of manners." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The books by 80-year-old American novelist, memoirist and essayist Edmund White-honest, fierce and joyful explorations of love, sex and family-have been breaking boundaries and engaging readers for nearly 50 years. His latest whisks us from the hardscrabble Texas prairie to the streets of Paris and Columbia…a stunner about the secrets and dreams that bind two very different women." - AARP
"The pagan and the saintly contend in this audacious new novel by Edmund White whose sympathy for his Texas-born characters radiates like a kind of blessing through their myriad adventures- sacred as well as secular, and always sensuously alive." - Joyce Carol Oates
"At once funny and moving, this is a ribald novel of the miraculous-a comic but searing exploration of sin and envy." - John Irving
"Like a waltz that goes out of control, this is a wild, dizzying, joyful romp. A Saint from Texas is a daring and exuberant novel in the spirit of Tristram Shandy, but it is also a brilliantly observed story about how we find ourselves by losing ourselves, about family bonds and how the harm done to us can warp us into something new. I loved it." - Ann Beattie
"One of our most interesting, serious, and mischievous writers." - Lorrie Moore
"One of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language." - Dave Eggers
This information about A Saint from Texas was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in 1940, Edmund White grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962. From 1983 to 1990 White lived in France; France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University.
White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and A Previous Life. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the ...
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