Pat Conroy Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Boo (1970)
  2. The Great Santini (1976)
  3. The Lords of Discipline (1980)
  4. The Prince of Tides (1986)
  5. Beach Music (1995)
  6. South of Broad (2009)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Water is Wide (1972)
  2. My Losing Season (2002)
  3. The Pat Conroy Cookbook (2004)
  4. My Life in Books / My Reading Life (2010)
  5. The Death of Santini (2013)
  6. A Lowcountry Heart (2016)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Pat Conroy Books Overview

The Great Santini

The Astonishing Autobiographical Bestseller By The Author Of Beach MusicToday his family would be called dysfunctional. Bull Meecham fighter pilot, warrior, juggler, clown and bully a hard drinking terror of a man who calls himself The Great Santini actually hides behind his misnomer. His swaggering mask is all Marine, and entitles him to be the absolute ruler of his family, which he handles with all the tenderness and understanding of a drill sergeant shaping up a class of new recruits. Bull’s wife, Lillian, is a beautiful steel magnolia without her cool head and infinite patience, the family would fall apart. Ben, at eighteen the oldest of Bull and Lillian’s three children, is a natural athlete whose best never satisfies his father. As Ben struggles to become his own man against the intimidation of his father, he’s forced to stand up, even fight back, against a man who refuses to give in. Bull Meecham is undoubtedly Pat Conroy’s most explosive character a man you should hate, but a man you’ll come to love, in this stingingly authentic production.

The Lords of Discipline

A novel you will never forget…
This powerful and breathtaking novel is the story of four cadets who have become bloodbrothers. Together they will encounter the hell of hazing and the rabid, raunchy and dangerously secretive atmosphere of an arrogant and proud military institute. They will experience the violence. The passion. The rage. The friendship. The loyalty. The betrayal. Together, they will brace themselves for the brutal transition to manhood…
and one will not survive. With all the dramatic brilliance he brought to The Great Santini, Pat Conroy sweeps you into the turbulent world of these four friends and draws you deep into the heart of his rebellious hero, Will McLean, an outsider forging his personal code of honor, who falls in love with a whimsical beauty…
and who undergoes a transition more remarkable then he ever imagined possible.

The Prince of Tides

In his most brilliant and powerful novel, Pat Conroy tells the story of Tom Wingo, his twin sister, Savannah, and the dark and violent past of the family into which they were born. Set in New York City and the lowcountry of South Carolina, the novel opens when Tom, a high school football coach whose marriage and career are crumbling, flies from South Carolina to New York after learning of his twin sister’s suicide attempt. Savannah is one of the most gifted poets of her generation, and both the cadenced beauty of her art and the jumbled cries of her illness are clues to the too long hidden story of her wounded family. In the paneled offices and luxurious restaurants of New York City, Tom and Susan Lowenstein, Savannah’s psychiatrist, unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment, and love. And Tom realizes that trying to save his sister is perhaps his last chance to save himself. With passion and a rare gift of language, the author moves from present to past, tracing the amazing history of the Wingos from World War II through the final days of the war in Vietnam and into the 1980s, drawing a rich range of characters: the lovable, crazy Mr. Fruit, who for decades has wordlessly directed traffic at the same intersection in the southern town of Colleton; Reese Newbury, the ruthless, patrician land speculator who threatens the Wingos’ only secure worldly possession, Melrose Island; Herbert Woodruff, Susan Lowenstein’s husband, a world famous violinist; Tolitha Wingo, Savannah’s mentor and eccentric grandmother, the first real feminist in the Wingo family. Pat Conroy reveals the lives of his characters with surpassing depth and power, capturing the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina lowcountry and a lost way of life. His lyric gifts, abundant good humor, and compelling storytelling are well known to readers of The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline. The Prince of Tides continues that tradition yet displays a new, mature voice of Pat Conroy, signaling this work as his greatest accomplishment.

Beach Music

Pat Conroy is without doubt America’s favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.

Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife’s suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister in law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompas*ses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South, and that leads him to shocking and ultimately liberating truths.

Told with deep feeling and trademark Conroy humor, Beach Music is powerful and compulsively readable. It is another masterpiece in the legendary list of classics that his body of work has already become.

PAT CONROY is the author of five previous books: The Boo, The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides, the last four of which were made into feature films.

South of Broad

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.

The Water is Wide

This heartrending story of the difference one man can make became the basis for the first film based on a Pat Conroy work, the much loved Conrack. The Water is WideYamacraw Island is nearly deserted. No one has paid much attention to it, nor to the few poor black families that live there. But this beautiful, haunting slip of land across the water from South Carolina is home to them, and they’ve lived off the bounty from the sea for generations. But now their very existence is challenged. Industrial waste, pouring into the water from which they pull their catches, threatens the only vocation they’ve known. Unless they can learn a new way of life, they will surely perish. The Water is Wide is the true story of a young white schoolteacher a man who gave a year of his life to give an island and a people renewed hope. He becomes the teacher to their children, and teaches the adults of Yamacraw Island extraordinary lessons they didn’t even know they needed to learn. With a moving performance by Will Patton, Pat Conroy teaches us all about the triumph of the human spirit in the most desolate of circumstances.

My Losing Season

PAT CONROY AMERICA S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER IS BACK! I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one…
. There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and others as an athlete. It was part of my own definition of who I was and certainly the part I most respected. When I was a young man, I was well built and agile and ready for the rough and tumble of games, and athletics provided the single outlet for a repressed and preternaturally shy boy to express himself in public…
.I lost myself in the beauty of sport and made my family proud while passing through the silent eye of the storm that was my childhood. So begins Pat Conroy’s journey back to 1967 and his startling realization that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life. The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now famous military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the author s love of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world. In fast paced exhilarating games, readers will laugh in delight and cry in disappointment. But as the story continues, we gradually see the self professed mediocre athlete merge into the point guard whose spirit drives the team. He rallies them to play their best while closing off the shouts of Don t shoot, Conroy that come from the coach on the sidelines. For Coach Mel Thompson is to Conroy the undermining presence that his father had been throughout his childhood. And in these pages finally, heartbreakingly, we learn the truth about the Great Santini. In My Losing Season Pat Conroy has written an American classic about young men and the bonds they form, about losing and the lessons it imparts, about finding one s voice and one s self in the midst of defeat. And in his trademark language, we see the young Conroy walk from his life as an athlete to the writer the world knows him to be. From the Hardcover edition.

The Pat Conroy Cookbook

This book is the story of my life as it relates to the subject of food. It is my autobiography in food and meals and restaurants and countries far and near. Let me take you to a restaurant on the Left Bank of Paris that I found when writing The Lords of Discipline. There are meals I ate in Rome while writing The Prince of Tides that ache in my memory when I resurrect them. There is a shrimp dish I ate in an elegant English restaurant, where Cuban cigars were passed out to all the gentlemen in the room after dinner, that I can taste on my palate as I write this. There is barbecue and its variations in the South, and the subject is a holy one to me. I write of truffles in the Dordogne Valley in France, cilantro in Bangkok, catfish in Alabama, scuppernong in South Carolina, Chinese food from my years in San Francisco, and white asparagus from the first meal my agent took me to in New York City. Let me tell you about the fabulous things I have eaten in my life, the story of the food I have encountered along the way…
America’s favorite storyteller, Pat Conroy, is back with a unique cookbook that only he could conceive. Delighting us with tales of his passion for cooking and good food and the people, places, and great meals he has experienced, Conroy mixes them together with mouthwatering recipes from the Deep South and the world beyond. It all started thirty years ago with a chance purchase of The Escoffier Cookbook, an unlikely and daunting introduction for the beginner. But Conroy was more than up to the task. He set out with unwavering determination to learn the basics of French cooking stocks and dough and moved swiftly on to veal demi glace and p te bris e. With the help of his culinary accomplice, Suzanne Williamson Pollak, Conroy mastered the dishes of his beloved South as well as the cuisine he has savored in places as far away from home as Paris, Rome, and San Francisco. Each chapter opens with a story told with the inimitable brio of the author. We see Conroy in New Orleans celebrating his triumphant novel The Prince of Tides at a new restaurant where there is a contretemps with its hardworking young owner/chef years later he discovered the earnest young chef was none other than Emeril Lagasse; we accompany Pat and his wife on their honeymoon in Italy and wander with him, wonderstruck, through the markets of Umbria and Rome; we learn how a dinner with his fighter pilot father was preceded by the Great Santini himself acting out a perilous night flight that would become the last chapters of one of his son s most beloved novels. These tales and more are followed by corresponding recipes from Breakfast Shrimp and Grits and Sweet Potato Rolls to Pappardelle with Prosciutto and Chestnuts and Beefsteak Florentine to Peppered Peaches and Creme Brulee. A master storyteller and passionate cook, Conroy believes that A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

My Life in Books / My Reading Life

Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is also a vora cious reader. He has for years kept a notebook in which he notes words or phrases, just from a love of language. But read ing for him is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity. In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of passionate reading. He includes wonderful anecdotes from his school days, mov ing accounts of how reading pulled him through dark times, and even lists of books that particularly influenced him at vari ous stages of his life, including grammar school, high school, and college. Readers will be enchanted with his ruminations on reading and books, and want to own and share this perfect gift book for the holidays. And, come graduation time, My Reading Life will establish itself as a perennial favorite, as did Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You ll Go! From the Hardcover edition.

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