A Saint from Texas

By Edmund White

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'An epic novel' - Telegraph

'A worldly wise delight' - Observer

'Another brilliant accomplishment from one of the country's most indispensable writers' - Texas Observer
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From legendary writer 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 grander fates. Just as an untold fortune of oil lies beneath their daddy's land, both girls harbour 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 marvellous 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 pretention of the Paris gratin and the strict piety of a Colombian convent.
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'Like a waltz that goes out of control, this is a wild, dizzying, joyful romp ... I loved it' - Ann Beattie
'White's deeply satisfying character study demonstrates his profound abilities' - Publishers Weekly
'One of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language' - Dave Eggers
'... sacred as well as secular, and always sensuously alive' - Joyce Carol Oates

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526600455

Edmund White

<p>Edmund White is the author of the novels <em>Fanny: A Fiction</em>, <em>A Boy's Own Story</em>, <em>The Farewell Symphony</em>, and <em>The Married Man</em>; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, <em>My Lives</em>. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.</p>

Reviews for A Saint from Texas

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edmund White is in an unusually jolly mood in this darkly comic satire about a pair of twin sisters from the outskirts of Dallas. It sometimes feels rather like Nancy Mitford's retelling of The Power and the Glory as we follow narrator Yvonne's shameless social climbing from forties Texas suburban nouveau-riche to Parisian gratin against the background of her sister Yvette's equally challenging and oddly parallel quest for humility and saintliness in a Colombian convent (that's "Why-von" and "Why-vet" if you're from Texas, BTW).The set-up gives White the chance to play around with ideas about the problem of attributing "saintliness" to an actual, complex human being who has lived in the modern world, and to wonder whether the religious life doesn't involve just as much social climbing and backstabbing as more worldly careers. And also about how much rewriting and expurgation inevitably goes into any kind of biography.But the main raison-d'être of the book is clearly to allow White to make fun of his aristocratic friends in France. It's full of ironic observations of the manners of the French upper classes, and wicked little sketches of people we would obviously recognise if we'd moved in the right circles back in the day. And a certain amount of name-dropping-with-hindsight ("Tell me about this Jacqueline Bouvier." — "She's nobody."). I particularly enjoyed White's send-up of the contemporary music world — Yvonne starts to hold musical salons, inviting the most appalling and deafening avant-garde composers she can find, and of course Paris society can't get enough of it.Very entertaining.