Charleston

Written by Margaret Bradham Thornton

Narrated by Susan Bennett

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490633114

Margaret Bradham Thornton

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.

Reviews for Charleston

[livelylady · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

When Charlestonian, Eliza, returns home she reunites with an old beau. This story nor the writing engaged me. I found the reading arduous.

[vicki_weisfeld · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There’s something about a man who’s “too perfect.” The feeling that something will go wrong hangs over your head as you turn the pages, waiting . . . In this debut novel, Eliza Poinsett is the daughter of an old Charleston family. (Supposedly, she’s a descendant of diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Charlestonian who introduced the flower that became the ubiquitous Christmas plant.) Educated at Princeton and Columbia, Eliza decamped to England after the love of her life, Henry Heyward, told her he was marrying someone else. His wife-to-be Issie was pregnant, and the marriage lasted not much longer than it took for her to produce young Lawton. Henry sued for custody and got it, and Issie departed for less socially correct climes.At the start of the book, Eliza has established herself in England with a job, a pending fellowship, and Jamie, her proper English boyfriend. Then she runs into Henry at a wedding. He’s available, Jamie doesn’t really move her, and she’s on the verge of her first return trip to Charleston in years, to attend her step-sister’s coming out party. She waffles about going, but of course she does, straight into the snares Henry quite cheerfully admits he’s setting for her. At one point, she tells now nine-year-old Lawton that she prefers tennis to sailing, because “I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.” Ah, but the reader can.Nevertheless, Eliza dithers half-heartedly, weighing the pain of missed opportunities in England against the hope of second chances. Since the book is written from Eliza’s point of view, it would have been helpful to explore more deeply what underlies her ambivalence.The author does a wonderful job of evoking Charleston— its geography, weather, history, architecture, and most of all, culture. That part of the book I enjoyed a lot. In other areas, the text signals “research!” or some obvious error plants a seed of doubt about the whole enterprise. For example, she refers to a pastel portrait as a “painting” or to a watercolor “canvas.” Those are slip-ups a good editor should have helped her avoid and they would have mattered less if Eliza weren’t an art historian, supposedly up on such basics. For my taste, the book is too much of a soap opera romance, moving at a soap opera pace, with only its admirable atmospherics to sustain it. The ending, which I won’t reveal, shouldn’t burst out of the blue as it does; it needed some careful foreshadowing and a more realistic treatment. Again, an editor should have helped with that.I was puzzled about the naming of the principal characters Henry H. and Eliza, since the parallel with the more famous duo stops with the names. The explanation is in an author interview with Adam Parker in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. Thornton said, “When we restored our house, we found on the original paint layer of a door jamb the names and heights of the Heyward children who had lived in the house in the 1830s. I liked the idea of taking the name of one of the children for one of the main characters. In Shaw's ‘Pygmalion,’ Henry Higgins brings Eliza Doolittle into the mannered world of aristocratic London. In ‘Charleston,’ Henry goes in the opposite direction and brings Eliza into the untamed world of Lowcountry swamps.” OK, but without that explanation, and perhaps with it, it’s a confusing choice.I wish there were perfect men like Henry in the world waiting to sweep us gals off our feet, but, meanwhile, we have the fascinating city of Charleston. As New York Times reviewer Meghan Daum says, in this book, “the real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds ‘like a slow kind of applause.’” The story takes place around 1991, and I wonder how much Charleston—whose ways and mores here seem set in amber—has changed in the interim.

[waldhaus1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. I was prompted to read it after listening to a presentation the author made about her subsequent book. She explained that for her the goal of writing a novel is to explore important questions.One question in this instance could be: how can you go home again and what does home mean to you. Tennessee Williams puts in an appearance - clearly Thornton has a deep personal connection to his work and a deep interest in many aspects of his life. There is a dual protagonist: Eliza who returns to Charleston while completing some research, and Charleston the city.I felt I had a much richer understanding of Charleston after completing the book.A good book needs 2 fundamental qualities in my perspective: 1) a good story that draws the reader in; and 2) characters that become real to the reader and rich enough in development that the reader cares about what happens to them.Charleston the book succeeds in both tests.

[abitbookish · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I trudged thru this book reluctantly, if felt like a chore. It's really too bad because Charleston itself was a major character in this book, and while it had moments of lyrical beauty somehow it fell flat overall, it was kinda like listening to an orator in a monotone voice. I love southern novels so much, I stuck with it, frankly,if I could turn back time, I would pick up this book admire the cover, then put it back on the shelf.

[icewineanne · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel needed a good editor before it was published. I read the first 7 chapters, and realized that, so far, much of the writing was just filller and that the story at this point could have been pared down to 3 chapters.
At this point I wasn't interested in reading the rest of the book just to find out if the main character chose to stay with her old flame in Charleston, or if she decided to fly back to England to spend the rest of her life with her new boyfriend. So I skipped everything after ch.7 and read the last 2 chapters to see how the author ended the dilemma.
A lot of readers just loved this book, but I'm glad that I didn't invest the time to read the in between pages - Hah!

[miyurose_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I so enjoy John Jakes. And I got an extra tickle from this one because he refers to a few of his other books in it.

[kinfae · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Once more, John Jakes gives us a novel where a man happens to love a beautiful but evil woman, which causes great unhappiness, and her evil evil blood passes down the generations, while the hero's blood are all noble and good and gay. Oh, and let's not forget the sexity sex sex. This is a truly abominable book, and anyone that can take it off my hands is more than welcome to.