But once she decided to try her hand at a novel she says she worked hard "to make sure that I didn't close a chapter down at the end". She had no idea where the story was leading ("which is the fun part"), and loved the shift in narrative perspective the novel allowed her.Meloy's family has a tradition of Catholics and Protestants intermarrying though she says her upbringing was "very secular". But with Liars and Saints she became aware of her own Catholic sensibility and became fascinated by the mystical and magical. Characters embrace the faith, reject it utterly, find it won't let them go.The book manages to be moving and avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality and melodrama. "It's about how everyone muddles through doing what they think is right at the time, but it turns out it wasn't.

I'd like to think that although it's an American book, it's about basic human things: loss, love, betrayal, jealousy, sex and death. Things that travel."The Santerre family is already travelling. At a recent book signing a woman thumped down Liars and Saints, telling Meloy, "You don't look Italian." "I said, 'Oh, should I?' And she said, 'Well, we had Santerres down the street from us and they were Italian.'" The Santerres in her novel are French-Canadian "To me that's sort of amazing," says the writer, smiling. "She had had a great experience reading it and had so connected with this 'Italian' family, and I thought - why not?". To anyone who knows nothing of all this, this new life of Mao might serve as a useful introductory primer.

But for anyone else this attempt at a "groundbreaking biography" will be deeply problematical.I imagine most people would accept it as axiomatic that a good biography (never mind a great one) of a towering political figure cannot be written from a stance of pure hatred. As we know from Jung Chang's Wild Swans, she suffered grievously during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But that in itself does not establish one's credentials to be a Mao biographer. The problem with this book is that it is an 800-page polemic, along the lines of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, but unconscionably prolix, and a sustained polemic does not a biography make.Let me make it clear that I fully share the authors' view that Mao was a monster, as were Hitler and Stalin.