My Losing Season

A poignant and moving yet funny and unlikely coming-of-age memoir.

Conroy's prose is sweepingly lyrical-taking on emotionally laden issues in chapters so direct and powerful that readers will be moved by his intimacy with the material, and perhaps astonished by his authority over it

Pat Conroy is the author of The Boo, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music and My Losing Season.

In 1954, in Orlando, Florida, nine-year-old Pat Conroy discovered the game of basketball. Orlando was another new hometown for a military kid who had spent his life transferring from one home to another; he was yet again among strangers, still looking for his first Florida friends, but when the 'new kid' got his hands on the ball near the foul line of that unfamiliar court, the course of his life changed dramatically. From that moment until he was twenty-one, the future author defined himself through the game of basketball. In My Losing Season, Conroy takes the reader through his last year playing basketball, as point guard and captain of The Citadel Bulldogs, flashing back constantly to the drama of his coming of age, presenting all the conflict and love that have been at the core of his novels. He vividly re-creates his senior year at that now-famous military college in Charleston, South Carolina, but also tells the story of his heartbreaking childhood and of the wonderful series of events that conspired to rescue his spirit. With poignancy and humour Conroy reveals the inspirations behind his unforgettable characters, pinpoints the emotions that shaped his own character as a young boy, and ultimately recaptures his passage from athlete to writer.

Beach Music

The long-awaited new novel by the author of the bestselling The Prince of Tides.

'Conroy has a passion for words and story, a way of making the reader trust his revelations, and an icily observant eye'

'Conroy is at his absolute best...a master storyteller'

'Rich in haunting imagery and seductive, suspenseful storytelling'

'A thumping good read, superior in its lyricism and wisdom to everything else in the popular genre'

Pat Conroy is the author of six books: The Boo, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music.

With the spectacular worldwide success of his unforgettable novel The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy established himself as a major international writer. He is known for his anguished and painfully honest insights into families and the human heart. He now returns with Beach Music, a story which tells of a family haunted by dark memories that reach back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust. 
 
Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, is 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, who want his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietman protester and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South: a quest that leads him to shocking and ultimately liberating truths.

Lords Of Discipline

A young man's violent coming of age in a Carolina Military Academy.

'Pat Conroy's is the most articulate and commanding voice to speak for and from the south since Thomas Wolfe'

'Tremendous depth, intricacy and compression...a novel about virtues we neglect to our diminishment: courage, brotherhood and victory over the difficult obstacles to authentic manhood'

'A work of enormous power, passion, honour and wisdom'

This powerful novel is the story of four cadets who have become bloodbrothers. Together they will encounter the hell of vicious bullying 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 of them will not survive. 
 
Based on Conroy's own experiences at The Citadel Military school in Charleston, The Lords of Discipline is a remarkable novel.

Pat Conroy

A masterpiece that can compare with Steinbeck's East of Eden... Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince of Tides is a rarity. It does all three

A big, sprawling saga of a novel... the kind you can hole up with and put down feeling that you've emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell

A moving novel which manages to shock you, make you cry and laugh

Pat Conroy's inspired masterpiece relates the dark and violent chronicle of an astounding family: the Wingos of Colleton, South Carolina. No reader will forget them. And no reader can remain untouched by their story. 
 
All Wingos share one heritage ... shrimp fishing, poverty and the searing memory of a single terrifying event - the source of Tom Wingo's self-hatred and of his sister Savannah's suicidal despair. 
 
To save himself and Savannah, Tom confronts the past with the help of New York psychologist Susan Lowenstein. 
 
As Tom and Susan unravel the bitter history of his troubled childhood, in episodes of grotesque humour, poignant lyricism and shattering violence, the door opens vividly onto a world peopled by a cast of colourful, eccentric and unforgettable characters.

Pat Conroy

Praise for The Prince Of Tides

A masterpiece that can compare with Steinbeck's East of Eden... Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince of Tides is a rarity. It does all three

A big, sprawling saga of a novel... the kind you can hole up with and put down feeling that you've emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell

A moving novel which manages to shock you, make you cry and laugh

A masterpiece that can compare with Steinbeck's East of Eden... Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince of Tides is a rarity. It does all three

A big, sprawling saga of a novel... the kind you can hole up with and put down feeling that you've emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell

A moving novel which manages to shock you, make you cry and laugh

A masterpiece that can compare with Steinbeck's East of Eden... Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince of Tides is a rarity. It does all three

A big, sprawling saga of a novel... the kind you can hole up with and put down feeling that you've emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell

A moving novel which manages to shock you, make you cry and laugh

Books by Pat Conroy

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