Peachtree Road [Abridged] [Audio Cassette]

Anne Rivers Siddons (Author), Peter MacNicol (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 29, 1989

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable and her now reclusive cousin Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, have been confidants ever since Lucy came to live with Shep's family. These two and their town has been through much over the years, and whether they can survive it together still remains to be seen....


From the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As in the bestselling Homeplace , Siddons again depicts the demise of genteel Atlanta and its submergence in the Sunbelt culture while keeping the reader engrossed in a suspenseful tale featuring vividly portrayed characters. If sometimes her prose acquires melodramatic excess, Siddons is generally a gifted raconteur in the style of Pat Conroy, and her imaginative plot twists make this hefty novel an absorbing page-turner. From the sad vantage point of middle age, narrator Shepard Gibbs Bondurant III tells the story of his bewitchingly beautiful but manipulative, destructive cousin Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable. Abandoned by her father and ignored by her cold, social-climbing mother, Lucy has an insatiable need for love and protection. She commands Shep's devotion and loyalty through her two doomed marriages even as her volatile behavior accelerates into madness. Meanwhile, she has destroyed Shep's relationship with Sarah Cameron, daughter of another socially prominent Atlanta family. Central to the novel is Siddons's portrayal of Atlanta's social elite, who live in the exclusive suburb called Buckland, epitomized by Peachtree Road. Her depiction of the young set, called Pinks and Jells, "the golden elect of an entire generation," is a cameo of social history. She is equally adroit in interpolating civil rights and other germane social issues into the plot. But it is as an accomplished story teller that Siddons makes her mark, pulling out all the emotional stops in a compulsively readable narrative. 50,000 first printing; $55,000 ad/promo; Troll Book Club main selection; author tour.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable and her now reclusive cousin Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, have been confidants ever since Lucy came to live with Shep's family. These two and their town has been through much over the years, and whether they can survive it together still remains to be seen....

From the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (November 29, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394580443
• ISBN-13: 978-0394580449
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,573,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A roller coaster ride of love, passion and duty, March 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Peachtree Road (Mass Market Paperback)

"Peachtree Road" is a romantic tale of a southern gentleman and a strong-willed, black-haired southern beauty set against changing times in the South. Another "Gone With the Wind"? No, not by a long-shot! This time the story takes place in the aristocratic homes of Atlanta's wealthiest residents during the changing and turbulent years of the 20th century.

Young Lucy Bondurant comes to live in the home of her cousin, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, and takes him and everyone she knows, including the reader, on a roller coaster ride through life. "Gibby" is torn between his love and duty for his cousin and his romantic love for another woman. The results are tragic for him ... or is he fulfilling his destiny? You, as the reader, must decide.

This book is very long (over 800 pages), but worth the time. Revel in the character development. Savor the relationship you will build with the characters for you will be with them from childhood until death. Speed through the streets on bikes behind Lucy, whoop it up with the Pinks and Jells, march with the Civil Rights Movement and cry through the tragedies that no one is immune from -- not even the very rich.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Though I desperately wanted to see how it concluded, I felt like I had lost my best friend when I was done.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Southern fiction at its best., May 26, 2002

By 

Denise Bentley "Kelsana" (The California Redwoods) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Peachtree Road (Mass Market Paperback)

Like only this author can be. Lucy and Shep Bondurant are cousins that are clearly headed on a path to destruction from the opening chapter of this book. When Lucy comes to live in the Atlanta house with Gibbs's family she takes his heart and breath away. From this meeting of two lonely children a strong lifelong bond grows, one that will go beyond words and even death.

Siddons writes with a style of her own, beautiful, rambling, expressive prose that leaves you feeling the heat and charm of Atlanta and it's nobility. Her characters are not always likable but they are intensely human, making them more than just cardboard cut heroes and heroines. I enjoy the incredible way this author puts the reader in the scene.

I have enjoyed several of this authors book's. My favorite, and the jewel in her crown, as my friend Rachel once put it, is COLONY a book that will warm your heart for years to come. Kelsana 5/26/02

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't Blame The South For The Likes of Lucy Bondurant!, January 2, 2004

By 

Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Peachtree Road (Mass Market Paperback)

If, as Anne Rivers Siddons insinuates in the opening lines of this novel, the South killed Lucy Bondurant, then no one need ever take responsibility for their bizarre actions and dysfunctional behavior. Just blame it on your hometown. Hogwash, Ms. Siddons! You have given us much better than this cop-out.

Lucy and her mother, brother, and sister are seemingly abandoned by Lucy's father and this fact haunts her for her entire life as she searches for a father figure everywhere. When her family takes up residence with wealthy relatives, she forms a bond of love and hate with her cousin Shep. The fact that she ruins his life while destroying every chance at happiness he ever has, the fact that she is amoral, self-centered, and totally without real love for anyone cannot be blamed so easily on the fact that Atlanta emerged from a sleepy Southern hamlet to become one of the country's greatest metropolitan areas. There were too many other abandoned children (and worse) who turned into fine, upstanding adults in spite of early misfortunes.

In addition to Lucy being totally unlikeable as a heroine, it was the narrator Shep who made me sick with his pushover personality. He enables Lucy every page of the novel and, amazingly, never sees her for the troublesome, demented woman she becomes. Poor Shep the doormat.

Despite two highly unlikeable characters taking center stage in this novel, the story might be interesting since it is set in a pivotal time-frame of American history and one which today's aging baby boomers are very familiar with---Camelot, the assassination of JFK, the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King's dream, etc. However, it slogs painfully along for about 400 pages before things really begin to happen. Where were the editors on this one?

As I moved into the final 200 of 800+ pages, I began to think that maybe this was a pretty good book after all. That's before the author knocked the wind out of me by ending with such ambiguity that I'm not sure what really happened. So now I am desperately searching for friends, enemies, anyone who read this book and begging them to enlighten me as to what *really* happened in the last two paragraphs.