South of Broad by Pat Conroy Paperback Book

Details

Rent South of Broad

Author: Pat Conroy

Narrator: Deakins, Mark

Format: Unabridged-CD, Paperback

Publisher: Random House Audible

Published: Aug 2009

Genre: Fiction - Literary

Retail Price: $45.00

Synopsis

The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.

Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest; a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.


From the Hardcover edition.

View descriptions at Amazon.com

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Reviews

BookLender review by Christine Evans on 2020-01-28 15:47:11

Slow and boring

BookLender review by Joanne on 2010-11-17 20:18:14

i very much enjoyed this book.i love the way pat conroy writes his characters.you likely have never met anyone like them but he makes you believe they really do exist.it's a story about survival and also about those who can't overcome their past even with love.

BookLender review by Lorraine on 2010-06-08 08:53:44

The beginning of this book is great then it gets a little over the top with the main character, and the dialogue becomes stilted and unbelievable, It continues to get worse as the book goes on. I was really disappointed in this book. I was so looking forward to another conroy too. The characters were unbelieveable, and well almost cartoonish. The main character might as well have had angel wings everything was just too much. I wish the editor had done a better job.