Charleston: A Novel

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

Overview

A gifted writer makes her fiction debut with this lyrical and haunting story of missed chances and enduring love, set against the backdrop of high society Charleston, which probes the eternal question: can we ever truly go home again?

When Eliza Poinsett left the elegant world of Charleston for college, she never expected it would take her ten years to return. Now almost a decade later, she is an art historian in London with a charming Etonian boyfriend who adores her. But the past catches up with her when she runs into Henry, her childhood love, at a wedding in the English countryside.

Already unnerved by the encounter, Eliza’s carefully guarded equilibrium is shattered when she meets Henry again in Charleston, where she’s come for her stepsister’s debut. Set against a backdrop of stately homes, the seductive Lowcountry landscape, and the entangled lives of families who trace their ancestors back for generations, Eliza has to decide if she is willing to risk everything for which she has worked so hard to be with the only man she has ever truly loved.

Charleston is an evocative, melancholy novel about one woman’s love—for both a man and an unforgettable city. Emotionally resonant, beguiling in its atmosphere, it illuminates the elusive notion of home, and explores whether we can we truly ever go back to the place—and the people—that indelibly shaped us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062332547
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/29/2014
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	602,779
File size:	575 KB

About the Author

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the author of Charleston and the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in autobiography/memoir and the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship published in 2006, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Florida.

Editorial Reviews

09/15/2014
Thornton, editor of Tennessee Williams's Notebooks, and a Charleston, SC, native, makes her fiction debut with this title. The novel conveys a strong sense of place as it describes the city's landmarks, local eccentrics, and high society through the story of Eliza Poinsett, a white woman returning to the town she grew up in after a decade away. After working in London on an art history fellowship and becoming seriously involved with an English boyfriend, Eliza runs into her old flame Henry at a wedding in England and spontaneously visits Charleston to see him. Their love is easily rekindled but complicated by the presence of Henry's nine-year-old son. Upon returning to the world of debutante parties, cotillions, and old money, Eliza discovers that her hometown seems the same but wonders whether she's changed too much to stay. VERDICT Too tame for fans of the bawdy reality TV show Southern Charm, this is a bittersweet love story with well-mannered Charlestonians who discuss art, ignore race and politics, dance at society parties, take romantic walks, eat excellent food, drink moderately, and don't have sex in front of the reader.—Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA

Library Journal

05/26/2014
In this fiction debut, Thornton isn't successful in an account of a woman's return home and attempt to recapture a lost love. Set in 1990, Eliza Poinsett, a London art historian, starts the book off by musing about the chance occurrences that brought her old flame Henry Heyward back into her life after years apart, causing her to wonder what to do about her current boyfriend and to wonder whether Fate "had its arms wrapped so tightly around her that it would never let her go." Eliza meets Henry again at a wedding in England after 10 years apart, but the plot follows a predictable arc; Eliza returns home to Charleston, SC, where she finds that while "she had lost part of herself… now it was coming back to her." She and Henry, a newspaper publisher, reconnect, as she finds herself more and more drawn to the one who got away, despite the presence of another man. Readers putting a premium on subtlety and originality will be disappointed. (July)

Publishers Weekly

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

“Much more than a romance, for it delves into issues of identity, place, memory and more.” — Charleston Post & Courier

“A purposely quiet and subtle novel” — Kirkus Reviews

“Prepare to be swept away..... Margaret Bradham Thornton does a spectacular job...Charleston is my favorite Southern city and Thornton does it true justice..... I couldn’t put this novel down.” — San Francisco Book Review

Charleston is a character here, and in fact may rival Eliza for the lead role. . . . I read it in a day and wanted to get my plane ticket booked once I closed it.” — BookReporter

“Charleston is a novel of enormous southern charm and a deep, sweet wisdom. As Thornton so beautifully puts it, it is ‘only okay to look for what was lost if you were prepared to find something unexpected.’” — Anna Funder

From the Publisher

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

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

September Hot Type title

Vanity Fair

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

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

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

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

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

[An] emotionally expansive, visually lush novel . . . a panoply of tints and tones

Edgefield Advertiser

Much more than a romance, for it delves into issues of identity, place, memory and more.

Charleston Post & Courier

Charleston is a character here, and in fact may rival Eliza for the lead role. . . . I read it in a day and wanted to get my plane ticket booked once I closed it.

BookReporter

Prepare to be swept away..... Margaret Bradham Thornton does a spectacular job...Charleston is my favorite Southern city and Thornton does it true justice..... I couldn’t put this novel down.

San Francisco Book Review

Charleston is a novel of enormous southern charm and a deep, sweet wisdom. As Thornton so beautifully puts it, it is ‘only okay to look for what was lost if you were prepared to find something unexpected.’

Anna Funder

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

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

2014-06-15
A woman’s dilemma—whether to forgo an international academic career for romance in her native Charleston—is the subject of Thornton’s debut.Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1990, is an insular world where a clique of founding families cherishes their heritage, clinging to antebellum ways while snubbing the tourists and newcomers who are fueling the city’s economic resurgence.It's a world with which Thornton is, clearly, intimately familiar, and as a portrait of a city mired in the past, it works. What works less well is the story she sets against this headily atmospheric backdrop. Eliza, who, like the author, is an academic and a Charleston insider, attempted to escape her roots by moving to New York and then London to study art history.She has a liaison with Jamie, an upper-crust Englishman, but she has unresolved feelings for her childhood sweetheart, Henry, whom she left when he was unfaithful. His alcohol-fueled fling with an unbalanced Southern belle, Issie, resulted in an unplanned pregnancy and a hasty marriage and divorce. Devoid of motherly feeling, Issie has let Henry raise their son, Lawton, now 9, alone. On a visit home after a 10-year absence, Eliza is ineluctably drawn back to Henry. The only problem, besides a complete lack of narrative drive, is the absence of believable chemistry between Henry and Eliza. The couple’s rapprochement is eked out in long scenes of walking and driving, calling on friends, trips to the beach and to tennis matches, etc., which unspool with excruciating slowness almost in real time. Not until Page 200 does trouble surface in the form of a newly maternal Issie, who finally triggers some dramatic tension. It's telling that a subplot involving Eliza’s quest to authenticate a painting for an impoverished Charleston widow is more engrossing than the love story.The moving close can't redeem this novel; most readers will have given up long before the end.

Kirkus Reviews