In Beach Music Pat Conroy writes of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the despair of the Holocaust.

Jack McCall is an American living in Rome with his young daughter, 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 asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam 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, and that leads him to shocking — and ultimately liberating — truths.

Told with deep feeling and trademark Conroy humor, Beach Music is a powerful and compulsively readable novel.  Paperback and 768 pages.