But he's quick to admit his friends inspired South of Broad. 'A few of them were really nervous about it,' he says, laughing, 'but they're completely all over it.' In fact, Conroy's thematic fingerprints are all over this novel: friendship, family, suicide, abused children, raw, intense emotions and a matchless evocation of place.

Opening in Charleston in the 1960s, it spans 30 years in the life of Leo Bloom and his circle of friends. Lush, lyrical and emotionally charged, the novel is also a love letter to the city. 'I've been wanting to write a Charleston novel my whole life,' says the Atlanta-born Conroy, who was a student at The Citadel, its famous military academy. 'As I walked the streets, I wasn't able to believe the sheer loveliness of that city.'

Conroy graduated from The Citadel in 1967, an institution he made doubly famous by exposing its harsh military discipline, racism and sexism in The Lords of Discipline, later made into the film of the same name. 'From that moment I wanted to do a book where Charleston itself had a role.'

The new novel takes its title from Charleston's most aristocratic suburb, and is in honour of his former English teacher, Gene Norris, who first took him there, and whose character inspired a cantankerous, philosophising antiques dealer in the novel. 'He was simply one of those world-changing teachers that you come across very rarely, but when you do, they never leave you. They're like carry-on luggage for the rest of your life,' Conroy says.

'We would go what he would call ramblin' on weekends, and driving down Broad Street he said, 'Now you're going to the most beautiful place in America', and South of Broad I realised is one of those demarcation lines that is in almost every city, town and country, but in Charleston it means aristocracy and breeding, mystery and wealth and sometimes scandal.'

Nothing about Conroy is run-of-the mill. As famous for his larger-than-life persona as he is for his books, he was a teacher before running foul of the school administration on South Carolina's Daufuskie Island, where he volunteered to teach black students in a one-room school during the first year of teacher integration. In retaliation he penned his first book, The Water is Wide, which exposed the school's racism, won him a humanitarian award and became the film Conrack, starring Jon Voight. 'That forced me into a writing career,' Conroy says. 'Teaching releases all the passion in me, but it's also related to my writing. I was knocked out of the classroom, but I still have some things to say that I want people to get, and I think writing novels is the way I've had to learn to do it.'

He learned to do it so well, he sent 'shockwaves' through his family with 1976's The Great Santini, a largely autobiographical account of his father's brutality to his family. Made into a film starring Robert Duvall, it cost Conroy not only his own marriage, but his mother presented the book to the judge as evidence in divorce proceedings against his father.

But perhaps no controversy approached the level of that triggered by The Lords of Discipline, which caused a rift with his old college for almost 20 years. His subsequent support of the first female cadet to seek entry into The Citadel, in 1995, saw a period when Conroy could not walk the streets of Charleston without someone stopping to abuse him.

'My college went crazy when that book came out, my family went crazy when The Great Santini came out and the southern education system went crazy when The Water is Wide was published.

'Now that I'm coming towards my dotage I'm trying not to get into any fights any more. I've been in one large fight my whole life.'

Today, that rift is healed, as was the one with his father before he died. 'As a young man I thought I had to get out of my father's brutal household, that was my main thing. It never occurred to me that life would be as hard as it's been, that it would be as emotional as it has been. Just last week I got a message from a friend who found her beautiful daughter hanging in her closet. You sometimes wonder how people ever make it.'

His own brother committed suicide; in the wake of that tragedy the remaining children forgave their father, says Conroy. 'So how would I ever write unemotionally?'

The criticism most frequently levelled at him is that his novels are too emotional. But for Conroy, any form of dispassionate prose 'is just boring to me. I can't take it. I wrote because I felt so deeply.'

He is planning a memoir about his father's late-life transformation. 'After I wrote The Great Santini, he set out to prove me wrong, so I feel this obligation to write about his change,' he says.

But first he will complete a book about reading. 'I have loved the reading part of my life and in some ways I feel it saved my life. You never know when you open it up, if that is the book that is going to change your whole life.'

Writer's notes

Pat Conroy

Age: 64

Born: Atlanta, Georgia, US

Current home: Fripp Island, South Carolina

Family: married to novelist Cassandra King

Genre: literary fiction and non-fiction

Latest book: South of Broad (Corvus, 2010)

Next project: A memoir

Other works include: The Boo (1970), The Water is Wide (1972), The Great Santini (1976), The Lords of Discipline (1980), The Prince of Tides (1986), Beach Music (1995), The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life (memoir, 1999), My Losing Season (2002)

Other jobs: teacher

What the papers say:

'Conroy is an immensely gifted stylist. No one can describe a tide or a sunset with his lyricism and exactitude.

' The Washington Post 'Conroy is a natural at weaving great skeins of narrative, and this one will prove a great pleasure to his many fans.' Kirkus Reviews