The Prince of Tides

The Prince of Tides is a novel by the American writer Pat Conroy, published in 1986.

Its narrator, Tom Wingo, is a teacher and football coach from South Carolina who is asked by his mother to go to New York and help the psychiatrist treating his twin sister, Savannah, after a suicide attempt. Savannah will not talk about their childhood, so Tom does, in a series of sessions that turn into the story of his own life: an island on the coast of South Carolina where the family lived, a father who was violent, a mother who was determined, and a younger brother whose fate the adult Tom is still carrying. Conroy tells the book in Tom's voice, at length and with a good deal of talk, and the South Carolina low country, its food, its waters and its history, is as present as the therapy sessions that frame the narrative.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1991, and Conroy went on to write several further novels about the same part of the American south.