Tom Wingo is a middle-aged man with a wife and three young daughters who has recently lost his job as a high school English teacher and football coach.

Starting in her childhood, Savannah experienced visual and aural hallucinations involving bloody figures and dogs which tell her to kill herself.

They are very different people: Susan is a wealthy Jewish psychiatrist who lives in New York City and Tom is a Catholic teacher who grew up poor in rural Colleton County, South Carolina.

Susan tells Tom about her shaky marriage to Herbert Woodruff, a famous concert violinist, and her husband’s affair with another woman.

We learn that Tom and his siblings, twin sister Savannah and their elder brother, Luke, were the offspring of an abusive father and uncaring mother.

Their father, Henry, a WWII bomber crewman who survived being shot down and managed to evade capture by the Nazis, thought that the best way to raise a family was by beating them, and did so regularly.

Their overly proud, status-hungry mother, Lila, was only concerned about the family's public image and would not let her children say a word about their father's abuse.

Lila ends up divorcing Henry many years later, and marries Reese Newbury, a prominent landowner in the city of Colleton and the father of Tom's childhood rival.

Luke, an ex-Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam, decides to fight for his land and the city by using guerrilla tactics to destroy bridges and building equipment, leading him to become a wanted man.

An FBI agent approaches Tom and asks him to offer Luke a deal of only three to five years in prison in exchange for his cease-fire.

After saving Savannah, Tom and Susan part ways and he returns to his family in South Carolina, reconciling with Sallie.

In 1991, a film version, with Nick Nolte as Tom, Melinda Dillon as Savannah, Kate Nelligan as their mother, and Barbra Streisand (who also directed and produced) as Lowenstein, was released.

In the television comedy series Ted Lasso (season 2, episode 2), sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone calls The Prince of Tides her favorite book.