Conroy, Pat

(US, 1946– )

Pat Conroy is well known as the author of Prince of Tides (1986), a chronicle covering forty years in the lives of the unhappy Wingo family in South Carolina, which was filmed in 1991, with Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte in starring roles. Conroy also wrote Beach Music (1995), which tells the moving and intriguing story of Jack McCall, living in Rome with his young daughter after his wife's death. When his mother falls ill, he returns to Carolina, to learn the truth about his curious childhood and the histories of both his own and his wife Shyla's families, and the reason for her suicide. With its characters haunted by memories of nineteenth-century pogroms in Russia and the twentieth-century horrors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, this huge novel exposes the closeness of patriotism and prejudice, and the political, social, and religious manifestations of both.

Winston Graham (his contemporary novels), Nicholas Evans, Harper Lee  FS