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Nan A. Talese
August 2009
On Sale: August 11, 2009
528 pages
ISBN: 038541305X
EAN: 9780385413053
Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
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