The horror, the horror... and the mystery, romance, biography, history, self-help, other fiction and non-fiction titles...
South of Broad
by Pat Conroy
"Kids, I'm teaching you to tell a story. It's the most important lesson you'll ever learn," says the protagonist of South of Broad, Pat Conroy's first novel in 14 years. One great word to the wise is that one great Southern story begets another and another, and it’s all generated from gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King — son of a loving science teacher father and school principal mother who was a nun and Joyce scholar. Reflections ensue of Leo's South Carolina hometown and friends after his older brother commits suicide at the age of 13 and his family, especially Leo, struggles to carry on after the devastating loss. Searching for something to shore himself up, the 18-year-old befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and psychotic father; scions of the Charleston upper crust; Appalachian orphans; and a black football coach's son. Switching between the 1960s and the 1980s, from summer of love counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the '80s, Conroy’s ever-involving narration follows the events of the likeable but troubled Leo in the beautiful South with its lingering traces of racism and malice, and later to San Francisco. But all the way South of Broad is marked with the author’s lyrical and poignant, if typically too sentimental, flight.
The Rapture
by Liz Jensen
It’s the end of the world as Bethany Krall, psychic psychotic teen Nostradamus, know it. Even before she killed her mother, she was an unusual girl for “interesting times”: intelligent and as manipulative in her own way as her father, an evangelical preacher. A patient at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital in Hadport, England, Bethany forms a strong bond with her psychologist, Gabrielle Fox. As Gabrielle treats her patient, the world suffers meteorological disasters foreseen by Bethany after electro-convulsive shock therapy. Meanwhile, Bethany has been distressed by the “Faith Wave” views of her father, who believes the Rapture is imminent. Since Bethany is convinced she bears the mark of the beast, she fears she’s not heaven-bound. Gabrielle seeks help from Frazer Melville, a physicist who takes Bethany's catastrophe calendar seriously. Meanwhile tension mounts as subplots sprout and the disruptive stakes multiply. Is the psycho of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator or herald of Armageddon? Where does science end and faith begin? With the doomsday dark Rapture Liz Jensen promises an apocalyptic white-knuckler.
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