When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children--two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old--love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute...

This richly textured novel tells a story of love and loss, sex and longing, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic...

"An octopus is taken from his undersea home to live in an aquarium, but he soon tires of captive life"--

A young woman from the Santerre clan accompanies her family to Argentina, where their lives become entwined with an uninhibited rich girl, an aging French playboy, a young Eastern European prostitute, and an orphaned child.