“South of Broad” is the story of teenage Charleston pariah Leopold Bloom King. And the parallels with “The Prince of Tides” extend beyond both main characters’ love for South Carolina. As if one abused child weren’t enough here we have a minivan’s worth.

Conroy is here for the storytelling, and won’t let readers go away bored. Minimalists can go mope at a Soho installation. And his lush, florid style has served him well with his fans. It’s a sprawling story that stretches across 20 years and both ends of the United States.Ĭonroy is from the more-is-more school of writing – if one analogy is good, three are better. The author of “ The Prince of Tides,” which sold more than 5 million copies, is one of a very few writers able to bridge commercial and literary circles, and South of Broad is his first novel in 14 years. August brings one name (besides Oprah, Harlequin, and Dan Brown) able to pry $30 from recession-weary Americans: Pat Conroy.

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.Booksellers looking at this year’s bottom lines through parted fingers finally have a reason to smile. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for. 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. 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. 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. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints.

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