Sullivan's Island

Sullivan's Island is the first novel by the American writer Dorothea Benton Frank, published in 2000. It is set on the South Carolina sea island of the title, between Charleston harbour and the open Atlantic, in a landscape of heat, storms and old families.

Susan Hayes was born and raised on the island and got through an unsettled childhood with humour, stubbornness and the particular sass of the Lowcountry. By the time the novel opens she is a woman in middle age with an unfaithful husband, a teenage daughter who resents her, and a great deal of feeling attached to a place she left behind.

When her own marriage becomes impossible to keep up, Susan goes back to the island and to her sister, who takes her in without hesitation. The house on the beachfront, the water and the people she grew up among force her to re-examine the secrets and betrayals that shaped her, and the novel alternates between the woman she is now and the island childhood that made her. Frank, who was herself raised in the area, went on to write a long series of novels set along the South Carolina coast.