South of Broad a novel

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. Leopo...

Full description

Main Author: Conroy, Pat.
Other Authors: Deakins, Mark.
Format: Audiobooks eAudiobook Downloads eAudiobook
Language: English
Published: New York : Random House Audio, 2009.
Edition: Unabridged.
Subjects:
Online Access: Go to Downloadable Audiobook Here.
Summary: 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.
Item Description: Unabridged.
Physical Description: 1 online resource (16 audio files) : digital
Playing Time: 20::0:1:
Format: Requires OverDrive Listen (file size: N/A KB) or OverDrive app (file size: 564447 KB).
ISBN: 9781415965405
Author Notes: Pat Conroy is the pen name of Donald Patrick Conroy, who was born in Atlanta, Georgia on October 26, 1945. He received a B.A. in English from The Citadel in 1967. After teaching high school at his alma mater, he accepted a job teaching disadvantaged black children in a two-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. Many of the children were illiterate, unable even to write their own names. He taught them using oral history and geography lessons. His experience on Daufuskie Island formed the basis for his first successful memoir, The Water Is Wide, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award from the Cleveland Foundation and was made into the movie Conrack starring Jon Voight in 1976. His novels include Beach Music and South of Broad. Several of his novels were adapted into movies including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides. He also wrote several works of non-fiction including The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life, My Reading Life, and The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2016 at the age of 70.

(Bowker Author Biography)