CHARLESTON: A Novel - Softcover

Thornton, Margaret Bradham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062332538 ISBN 13: 9780062332530

Publisher: EccoPress, 2015

Synopsis

Charleston

About this title

Review:

“In the tradition of great Southern novels, this lyrical tale explores the emotional terrain of love, loss, and memory. It’s about the tug of a person and of a place, leading us to confront what it means to look homeward again.” ( Walter Isaacson)

“The real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds ‘like a slow kind of applause... and the citizens speak with ‘dropped r’s that almost sounded English,’... [demonstrating] the lyricism and precision Thornton brings to her description of the region.” ( New York Times Book Review)

“The seductions of her hometown--’sun, smell of pluff mud, sound of the tide going out’--cast their spell... [a] refined romance . . . Thornton writes with characteristic elegance and restraint.” (Wall Street Journal)

“All the pieces are in place for... a Southern romance novel, a book-club pick, a beach read. What Thornton delivers...has more in common with her Williams book-an obsessive and poetic scaffolding of details...stitching them together into something larger while leaving the pieces to speak for themselves...” (Paris Review)

“Highly visual...far more evocative than many books ever manage... [Charleston] brings together a love story and a nuanced depiction of Charleston, which occupies a peculiar wrinkle within Southern culture...familiar to anyone who has contemplated returning to their hometown, wondering if it’s a step back or a ... move forward.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

September Hot Type title (Vanity Fair)

“Bradham Thornton’s eye for detail is superb, from the swamps of the ACE Basin to a South of Broad dinner party. The final act . . . is so powerful as to necessitate a reread.” (Charleston Mercury)

“[An] emotionally expansive, visually lush novel . . . a panoply of tints and tones” (Edgefield Advertiser)

“Margaret Thornton, in this beautiful novel, immerses us in a world, Charleston, a place both charmed and vexed by its many-layered history. Eliza’s short, sharp season of happiness forms a complete love story-lush, bittersweet, and dear.” (Ron Carlson)

“Eliza Poinsett is a fictional heroine, Southern at that. But she doesn’t depend on the kindness of strangers, as do so many of the heroines of Tennessee Williams’s plays. Eliza is the invention of Margaret Bradham Thornton...the award-winning [editor] of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks.” (Charlotte Observer)

From the Back Cover:

After ten years apart, two young Charlestonians meet by chance at a wedding in the English countryside. Eliza Poinsett is an art historian living in London with a boyfriend who adores her. Henry Heyward, Eliza's first love, is a charming, cultured newspaper man who knows how to navigate the swamps of the Lowcountry. What follows is the opportunity for a second chance.

Henry, a devoted father to his nine-year-old son, tries to explain to Eliza why he never wrote that important letter. And while Eliza is a modern woman, pushing against the boundaries of Southern clichés, she is forced to reconcile her independence with an eternal question: does home really ever let us go?

Set against a backdrop of stately homes, the lush Lowcountry landscape, and entangled lives of families who trace their ancestors back for generations, Charleston is an evocative, melancholy novel about one woman's love for both a man and an unforgettable city.

About this edition

• Publisher: EccoPress
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062332538
• ISBN 13: 9780062332530
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320