Fans of Conroy’s florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. By Pat Conroy This unforgettable New York Times bestseller is a memoir of Conroy’s year spent teaching on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina (fictionalized as Yamacraw Island in the book). 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. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator’s awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group’s love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. His mordant wit thinly masks a wounded psyche and misplaced guilt resulting from the death of his older brother by his own hand. At his best, as in the opening chapter of Beach Music, Conroy sweeps you up in a whirlwind of language and propels you through time and place so persuasively that you take in stride highly.

The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo’s coterie stormed Charleston’s social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. There are the complex characters: Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is a study in contrasts and deeply flawed. 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. In the late ’60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy Appalachian orphans a black football coach’s son and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. This is Conroys home field, the language of a culture bred on civility, the dark passions and brilliant celebrations that epitomize Southern hospitality. Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy’s first novel in 14 years.

South of broad by pat conroy