By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

“It is true there are some angels in this city,” Best Actress Marion Cotillard said when she nabbed the Best Actress Award at this year’s Oscars. Well, yeah—after all L.A.’s full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, Our Lady of the Queen of the Angels.

With angels come saints. And the winner of OUR informal Sunset Award for the best book about  Los Angeles we wish we had thought of is this new one by J. Michael Walker—All the Saints of the City of the Angels: Seeking the Soul of L.A. on its Streets.

Walker had a brilliant idea: he found all the L.A. streets named for saints, retrieved their stories and illustrated them in works that draw from Goya and folk art and 1920s real estate ads. From San Benito Street in Boyle Heights to San Remo Drive in Bel Air to San Sebastian Drive in Woodland Hills, each saint street tells a story, tragic, hopeful, beautiful, violent, that together form a remarkably powerful panorama of L.A. You’ll never look at your Thomas Brothers guide in the same way.

All the Saints is available from Heyday Books;  an accompanying exhibition, at L.A.’s Autry National Center,  runs from February 29 through September 7.