Saint X: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020, now a Hulu Original Series!
"'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day."
–Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review
When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become?
Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February!
Hailed as a "marvel of a book" and "brilliant and unflinching," Alexis Schaitkin's stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison's death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.
As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.
For readers of Emma Cline's The Girls and Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
Alexis Schaitkin. (2020). Saint X: A Novel. Celadon Books.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Alexis Schaitkin. 2020. Saint X: A Novel. Celadon Books.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X: A Novel. Celadon Books, 2020.
MLA Citation (style guide)Alexis Schaitkin. Saint X: A Novel. Celadon Books, 2020.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 4 | 3 |
There is 1 hold on this title.
OverDrive Product Record
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG100.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG200.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG150.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG400.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219589
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B07N67P3TP
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219589
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219596
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Alexis Schaitkin
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- Saint X
- dateAdded
- 2020-03-20T01:08:00Z
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=4559167
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
- sortTitle
- Saint X A Novel
- crossRefId
- 4559167
- subtitle
- A Novel
- id
- 31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7
- starRating
- 3.3
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- fileName: SaintX_9781250219589_4559167
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 5995602
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219589
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 2/18/2020
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=31e6d847-f8ab-4f98-b195-54e7de5578c7&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: SaintX_4559167
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B07N67P3TP
- name: Kindle Book
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-kindle
- onSaleDate: 2/18/2020
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=31e6d847-f8ab-4f98-b195-54e7de5578c7&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: SaintX_9781250219589_4559167
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219589
- name: OverDrive Read
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 2/18/2020
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=31e6d847-f8ab-4f98-b195-54e7de5578c7&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- keywords
- value: missing persons
- value: Vacation
- value: exotic
- value: Caribbean
- value: suspenseful
- value: new york city
- value: murder mystery
- value: highbrow
- value: best beach reads
- value: psychological drama
- value: domestic noir
- value: mystery thriller suspense
- value: family tragedies
- value: women mystery authors
- value: amazon best books of the year
- value: female suspense authors
- value: new york times best books of the year
- value: best books of 2020
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Schaitkin, Alexis
- bioText: Alexis Schaitkin is the author of Saint X. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children.
- name: Alexis Schaitkin
- publishDate
- 2020-02-18T00:00:00-05:00
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- Saint X
- fullDescription
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020, now a Hulu Original Series!
"'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day."
–Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review
When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become?
Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February!
Hailed as a "marvel of a book" and "brilliant and unflinching," Alexis Schaitkin's stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison's death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.
As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.
For readers of Emma Cline's The Girls and Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Christopher Tilghman, Author of Thomas and Beal in the Midi
- content:
"Saint X is slightly miraculous. Funny, chilling, moving, and throughout, deeply intelligent. We follow Emily into the depths of her obsessive quest with fascination and, in the end, rise with her as she moves on. This is an utterly original and engrossing novel written with the surest possible hand."
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
December 9, 2019
Schaitkin’s unsettling debut plays with the conventions of the romantic thriller to comment on the uneasy relationship between working-class residents of a fictional island in the Caribbean and the wealthy American tourists who visit it. In 1995, a couple from a New York City suburb and their two daughters, adventurous college freshman Alison and cautious seven-year-old Claire, visit a resort on the island. Alison flirts with two workers at the resort, Clive and Edwin, and takes off with them nightly without her parents’ knowledge to visit a local club, where she dances, drinks, and gets high. One night, she doesn’t return, and her body is soon found on a nearby island. Though suspicion falls on Clive and Edwin, they are not charged with any crime. In present-day N.Y.C., Claire, who narrates much of the novel, recognizes Clive, now a cab driver, from the back seat of his taxi. Obsessed with learning what happened to Alison, she stalks him while neglecting her work and friends. As Claire embeds herself in Clive’s life, he grows increasingly wary, until he finally snaps and reveals what he knows about the final night of Alison’s life. As the novel gradually shifts to Clive’s point of view, Schaitkin subverts the other characters’ assumptions about the lives and intentions of strangers. This is a smart page-turner, both thought-provoking and effortlessly entertaining. Agent: Henry Dunlow, Dunlow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
February 1, 2020
This buzzy debut features Claire, who was only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, was murdered while the family was vacationing in the Caribbean at a resort called Saint X. Now Claire has encountered Clive Richardson, a suspect in Alison's death, and begins to follow him, hoping he'll spill information about what really happened to her sister. Interestingly, this is not billed as crime fiction but women's fiction, suggesting a focuses on Claire's intense emotions.
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from December 15, 2019
The death of a teenage vacationer on a fictional Caribbean island reverberates through many lives, particularly those of her 7-year-old sister and one of the workers at the resort. "Look. A girl is walking down the sand....As she walks, heads turn--young men, openly; older men, more subtly; older women, longingly....This is Alison." A dangerous froth of sexual tension escalates around Alison Thomas, visiting Saint X from the wealthy New York suburbs with her parents and little sister, Claire. Schaitkin evokes her fictional resort with sureness--"the long drive lined with perfectly vertical palm trees," "the beach where lounge chairs are arranged in a parabola," the scents of "frangipani and coconut sunscreen and the mild saline of equatorial ocean." After the disaster, the focus shifts to Claire, who changes her name to Emily after her bereaved family moves to California but never escapes the shadow of the event. "I knew the exact day I outlived Alison. Eighteen years, three months, twelve days." When she moves back East for a publishing job in New York City, she crosses paths with one of the resort employees her sister was partying with the night she died. These men were exonerated in the matter of Alison's death, but Clive Richardson was arrested for selling pot in the process; after prison, his life is so devastated that he immigrates to Manhattan. After Emily gets in Clive's taxicab, her obsessive desire to know more about her sister's death--which, by now, the reader fully shares--consumes her life. The complex point of view, shifting among an omniscient narrator, Emily's perspective in first person, Clive's immigrant story in close third, plus brief testimonies from myriad minor characters, works brilliantly. Just as impressive are Schaitkin's unflinching examinations of the roles of race, privilege, and human nature in the long-unfolding tragedy. Setting the story in a fictional place, collaged and verbally photoshopped from real Caribbean settings, is daring, but this writer is fearless, and her gamble pays off. This killer debut is both a thriller with a vivid setting and an insightful study of race, class, and obsession.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- popularity
- 1692
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/31e6d847-f8ab-4f98-b195-54e7de5578c7/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- 31e6d847-f8ab-4f98-b195-54e7de5578c7
- starRating
- 3.3
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG100.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG200.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG150.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/{31E6D847-F8AB-4F98-B195-54E7DE5578C7}IMG400.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- publishDateText
- 02/18/2020
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781250219596
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020, now a Hulu Original Series!
"'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day."
–Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review
When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become?
Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February!
Hailed as a "marvel of a book" and "brilliant and unflinching," Alexis Schaitkin's stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.
Claire is only seven years...- sortTitle
- Saint X A Novel
- crossRefId
- 4559167
- subtitle
- A Novel
- publisher
- Celadon Books
- bisacCodes
- code: FIC019000
- description: Fiction / Literary
- code: FIC043000
- description: Fiction / Coming of Age
- code: FIC045020
- description: Fiction / Family Life / Siblings
