Charleston
A Novel
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3.8 • 77 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Thinking too much and feeling too much
I like to think I would love this book just as much if so much of it involved places I've been many times and names that are as familiar to me as my own. There's no way to ever know that though.
I've just finished the book and things are still too raw to say more than how grateful I am to the author and what if I'd never come across the book. It feels alive and I have a huge thing inside that I have no idea what it is or what to do with it at 1:20 A.M. Maybe take the dogs out and see if there's a moon to howl at. Maybe I'll find Henry.
Xx - Ashleigh
Tourist guide to Charleston
Too many historical references, too many characters, depressing ending. I read for pleasure and this was agnonizing.