Available August 11
Having written The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy didn't really have to write a novel again ever, and for a while there — the past 14 years — it looked like he wasn't going to. Now he has: South of Broad tells the life story of Leopold Bloom King (his mom is a Joyce scholar, deal with it), a young man who has the good and bad luck to come of age in Charleston, South Carolina in the late 1960s, when that beautiful city is sick with racial and social tension. Conroy tracks Leopold and his circle of glamorous and eccentric friends over the years as they marry and unmarry through the 1970s and '80s and '90s. It's a big, soapy, heartwarming novel, which is good if you like big, soapy, heartwarming novels, and bad if you don't.
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