Readers in the Lowcountry are getting behind the quirky novel The Bird in Your Heart: A Carolina Sea Island Story, published last summer by Southern fiction author Tim Bryant.
Primarily set on Edisto Island, The Bird in Your Heart is about an Atlanta advertising executive who divorces the boss’s daughter, loses his job, and returns to his family’s ancestral home on Edisto. He plans to sail off to see the world but his elderly mother is going blind and the old place needs huge repairs. A many-generations-long love of birdwatching reconnects him to his roots. Southern traditions, Gullah culture, and oddball island ways create a Low Country tangle built around birding, beaches and boats.
“The Bird in Your Heart is getting great response from people with ties to the Lowcountry and Edisto, including birdwatchers,” said Bryant, “We’re connecting through my descriptions of the area’s natural beauty and laid back way of life. To have this little clique develop is very encouraging. Writers live for that kind of feedback.”
South Carolina and The Lowcountry are also featured in Bryant’s first novel, Blue Rubber Pool, published in 2018, and his third novel, The Stained Glass Mustang, under contract for publication in 2026, is set in Charleston.
Bryant returned to his South Carolina roots after decades away and now lives in a beach house built in a cow pasture where, in addition to writing, he keeps a small vineyard, several fruit trees, and a patch of Japanese banana trees. His wife Crystal is a reading interventionist in the public school system.
For more information, visit the author’s web site: ArmadilloIsland.com.
