South of Broad

South of Broad: 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 13, 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.

• South of Broad (Unabridged) - iTunes Audiobook

  Price

  $23.95 Download on iTunes
  (as of 2012-05-11 15:01 PDT)

  Rating

  4.5 (37 reviews)

  Publisher

  Random House Audio

  Shop

  Apple iTunes Store

  Format

  iTunes Audiobook

  Publish Date

  Aug 11, 2009

  Sales Rank

  120

  Length

  20 hours 2 minutes

  Narrator

  Mark Deakins

  Presented by

  Audible.com

  Product Description / Editorial Review

  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 13, 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. — Source: Apple iTunes Store

  

• South of Broad - Hardcover

  Price

  $29.95 $0.01 (100% Off) Buy from Amazon.com
  (as of 2012-05-17 19:55 PDT)

  Rating

  3.5 (841 reviews)

  Publisher

  Nan A. Talese

  Shop

  Amazon

  Format

  Hardcover

  Publish Date

  Aug 11, 2009

  Sales Rank

  51834

  ISBN

  038541305X

  ISBN-13

  9780385413053

  Pages

  528

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  Product Description / Editorial Review

  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. — Source: Amazon

  

• South of Broad (Unabridged) - Digital Download

  Price

  £33.51 £23.49 (30% Off) Buy from Audible UK
  (as of 2010-04-01 0:00 PDT)

  Publisher

  Random House Audio

  Shop

  Audible UK

  Format

  Digital Download

  Publish Date

  Aug 11, 2009

  ISBN-13

  9780739382943

  Product Description / Editorial Review

  Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints.... — Source: Audible UK

  

• South of Broad - Hardcover

  Price

  $17.00 Buy from Walmart
  (as of 2012-05-11 15:01 PDT)

  Publisher

  Random House Inc

  Shop

  Walmart

  Format

  Hardcover

  Publish Date

  Aug 2009

  ISBN

  038541305X

  ISBN-13

  9780385413053

  Pages

  514

  Shipping Weight (in pounds)

  2.0

  Product in Inches (L x W x H)

  6.6 x 1.3 x 9.38

  Product Description / Editorial Review

  The one and only Pat Conroy returns with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston, South Carolina, and to lifelong friendship--a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds. — Source: Walmart

  

• South of Broad - Hardcover

  Price

  $29.95 $21.56 (28% Off) Buy from Barnes & Noble
  (as of 2012-05-11 15:01 PDT)

  Rating

  4.0 (439 reviews)

  Publisher

  Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

  Shop

  Barnes & Noble

  Format

  Hardcover

  Publish Date

  Aug 2009

  Sales Rank

  6070

  ISBN

  038541305X

  ISBN-13

  9780385413053

  Pages

  528

  Alternate Versions

  • eBook - $8.4
  • Paperback - $11.5
  • Compact Disc - Unabridged - $32.4
  • MP3 Book - Unabridged - $18.6

  Biography

  Pat Conroy's novels are populated with domineering fathers, Southern belles of steel, and inexorable tragedy; all are elements the author is familiar with from his own life, and he has drawn on them to create unforgettable books. He is sometimes accused of florid prose, but he never fails to draw attention -- and readers -- with his passionate stories.

  Library Journal

  "Kids, I'm teaching you to tell a story. It's the most important lesson you'll ever learn," says the protagonist of Conroy's first novel in 14 years (since 1995's Beach Music). Switching between the 1960s and the 1980s, the narrative follows a group of friends whose relationship began in Charleston, SC. The narrator is Leopold Bloom King (his mother was a Joyce scholar), a likable but troubled kid who goes from having one best friend, his brother, to having no friends after a tragedy, to having, suddenly, a gang, of which he is perhaps not the leader but certainly the glue. Conroy continues to demonstrate his skill at presenting the beauty and the ugliness of the South, holding both up for inspection and, at times, admiration. He has not lost his touch for writing stories that are impossible to put down; the fast pace and shifting settings grip the reader even as the story occasionally veers toward the unbelievable. VERDICT Filled with the lyrical, funny, poignant language that is Conroy's birthright, this is a work Conroy fans will love. Libraries should buy multiple copies.—Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens

  Publishers Weekly

  Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. 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. 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. 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. 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. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. (Aug.)

  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.

  The Barnes & Noble Review

  It's been 14 years between novels for Pat Conroy, a son of the South whose love of his native landscape is matched only by his obsession with the grim strength of family ties. Much of that darkness rises from experiences in his own life. He mined his explosive relationship with his father, a severe and controlling ex-Marine, for his debut novel, The Great Santini. He followed up with The Lords of Discipline, which scandalized his alma mater, The Citadel, with its unflattering portrayal. With The Prince of Tides, a bestselling novel turned A-list movie with Barbra Streisand, he cemented his spot in popular culture.
  
  Conroy's back on familiar turf with South of Broad, which, depending on the eye of the beholder, is either a sprawling saga brimful of characters and emotion and sense of place, or a period melodrama with a pretty travelogue thrown in.
  
  Litmus test:
  
  "I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like a hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness every day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic."
  
  That's Leopold Bloom King, the narrator of South of Broad, named for the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. Leo's a sweet, messed-up kid who, at 18 years old, already has a felony drug bust and a stint in a mental ward on his résumé. We meet him on June 16th, known to Joyceans as Bloomsday, the 24-hour span during which the author's famously impregnable novel takes place. The year is 1969, a tipping point for the civil rights movement and the coming countercultural revolution. Both will rock Leo's staid and stately hometown of Charleston.
  
  Leo's troubles began a decade before, the day he discovered the dead body of his charismatic ten-year old brother, Steve, a bloody suicide. The shock all but destroyed the King family. Leo's mother, a high school principal and a perfectionist, retreated into a frosty reserve. His father, a science teacher, struggled to fill the resulting gap. Leo himself went into a prolonged freefall. As we meet him on this Bloomsday, the lonely boy with the outlandish name is about to break free of the string of shrinks and probation officers who have marked his adolescence.
  
  "Because I was a timid boy, I grew fearful and knew deep in my heart the world was out to get me," Leo tells us in the first chapter. "Before the summer of my senior year, the real life I was always meant to lead lay coiled and ready to spring in the hot Charleston days that followed."
  
  That real life is set in motion as Leo reaches out, all in a single day, to an oddball collection of kids. There's Niles and Starla, a pair of runaways who, when Leo meets them, are dressed in bright orange jumpsuits and handcuffed to their chairs at St. Jude's Orphanage. Next, Leo bakes cookies to welcome the mysterious and seductive twins Trevor and Sheba Poe, who move in across the street. And at lunch at the country club Leo is recruited to help Chad, Fraser, and (Joyce alert!) Molly, society kids caught using drugs, learn the ropes at their new school. Add in a phone call from a nun, which reveals to Leo a stunning secret about his parents' marriage, and it's been almost as eventful a day as Leopold and Stephen's.
  
  All this makes for fast start and a dense read. Just three weeks later, as we're still sorting out who's who and what's what, Conroy shunts the whole gang 20 years into the future. It's 1989, and Leo's now a gossip columnist for Charleston's local newspaper. The ragtag group he assembled has become the core social force in his life. Bonds have formed. Marriages have taken place. Children have been born. When Trevor, one of the glamorous Poe twins, goes missing in his adopted city of San Francisco, the whole gang heads off to California to save him.
  
  The scope of the story blows wide open, and Conroy dives into the themes and characters that, from book to book to book, have a hold -- or stranglehold -- on him. There's physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, racism and class warfare, stalking and rape and murder, and, in the revelations about Steve's suicide, some very dark and rather familiar ground.
  
  There's also, amid a hefty bit of overwriting, some truly lovely stuff. Here Leo, the southern boy, nails California in two short sentences:
  
  "The West is both a great thirst and a dry, weatherless curiosity. In California, the mad, deep breath of deserts is never far away."
  
  It's Conroy's trademark prose, cinematic and sensitive. It makes you wish he'd stop swinging for the fences all the time, stop loading every last clause of nearly every sentence with so much stuff.
  
  In the end, though, when the drama has played out and the spectacle skids to a stop, when Leo and his friends return to their lives in Charleston, South of Broad turns out to be about love and acceptance, understanding, and that thing Conroy seems to seek most of all, forgiveness. --Veronique de Turenne
  
  Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.

  The Washington Post - Chris Bohjalian

  South of Broad is a big sweeping novel of friendship and marriageand, perhaps, vintage Pat Conroy…Conroy is an immensely gifted stylist, and there are passages in the novel that are lush and beautiful and precise. No one can describe a tide or a sunset with his lyricism and exactitude. My sense is that the millions of readers who cherish Conroy's work won't be at all disappointedand nor will anyone who owns stock in Kleenex.

  
  — Source: Barnes & Noble

  

• South of Broad (Unabridged) - Digital Download

  Price

  $45.00 $31.50 (30% Off) Buy from Audible.com
  (as of 2010-09-22 0:00 PDT)

  Publisher

  Random House Audio

  Shop

  Audible

  Format

  Digital Download

  Publish Date

  Jul 28, 2009

  Length

  20 hours 1 minute

  Narrator

  Mark Deakins

  Preview

  mwprealmp3

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  Product Description / Editorial Review

  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 13, 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. — Source: Audible