The Farewell Tour: A Novel
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Itโs 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.
Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.
As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillianโs youthโthe Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashvilleโand her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.
Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, sheโll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.
Exploring one unforgettable womanโs creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a worldโand an art formโmade for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.
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Stephanie Clifford is an award-winning investigative journalist and a bestselling novelist. As a New York Times reporter for almost a decade, she covered business and law. She now writes long-form investigations about criminal justice and business for the Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Elle, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other publications. Her accolades include the Loeb Award in Investigative Reporting, the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence from the News Leaders Association, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award in Explanatory Reporting, and the Deadline Club Award in magazine profiles, among others. Everybody Rise, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review editorsโ choice. She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
