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It’s Not Over Until the Country Music Star Says So

In her second novel, “The Farewell Tour,” Stephanie Clifford follows a veteran singer who’s wrapping up a long career on her own terms.

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By Amanda Eyre Ward

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THE FAREWELL TOUR, by Stephanie Clifford

“The Farewell Tour,” by Stephanie Clifford, is the story of Lillian Waters, a fictional country music singer in the vein of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. I loved Clifford’s debut novel, “ Everybody Rise ,” a vibrant explosion of a book set among graduates of elite prep schools in 2006 Manhattan, so I was eager to follow Clifford into the world of what one character calls “hillbilly music.”

As the novel opens, Lillian (also known by her stage name, “Water Lil”) is hitting the road one last time, planning a summer tour through “the county-fair circuit” and ending up in the town she fled as a child, Walla Walla, Wash. Unbeknown to her fans and band members, Lillian has a polyp on her vocal cord and plans to retire for good after Walla Walla; she’s not interested in treatments that could prolong her career. “As for surgery,” she says, “I knew one gal with the prettiest voice, sweet and clear as a flute, who went under the knife and sounded like Orson Welles afterward.”

Lillian is 56 years old in 1980 and washed up — her life full of struggles, mistakes and unrequited love, without much hope on the horizon. But as we follow Lillian’s farewell tour, we are also given alternating chapters that bring us back in time, starting in 1924. Water Lil’s rise to stardom is breathtaking; I enjoyed being immersed in a world of suede and fringed costumes, cowboy boots and giant wigs. I appreciated the look into the process of songwriting and one woman’s struggle to earn a place in the man’s world of Nashville in the late 1960s and ’70s, not to mention the even steeper hills faced by Lillian’s nonwhite friends and fellow musicians.

“The Farewell Tour” is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description. Of Bakersfield, Calif., in 1960, Lillian says, “In the day, the light was harsh and flat and brought out the scuffs and dust.” At night, though, “When the heat receded and the sky grew dim, Bakersfield came alive in neon and rhythm guitar.”

An account of Water Lil’s early shows reads like a found poem: “We played the Hidy-Hody Ranch Bar, and the Circle-M Saloon, the Round-Up Rodeo and the Boiler Room, the Gunshot Lounge and Gunshot Bar and Gunshot Club.” When she checks in with her manager Coy Roy via pay phone, he reminds her to sing about topics like “lost love,” which put her in a sympathetic light. “That meant: no songs about the road, about ambition, about men I tumbled into hotel beds with when I was drunk enough.”

Even as her tour stops leap off the page, Water Lil herself remains a cipher. Perhaps this is inevitable — she has spent her life dressing up in costumes and writing songs about a false persona, one created for commercial appeal and stripped of agency and messy desires. But something breaks loose when she visits Tule Lake, Calif., where the parents of Lillian’s Japanese American fiddle player, Kaori, were interned during World War II. When Kaori asks why Lillian didn’t do anything to protest the internment camps, she responds, “I didn’t know what to do.” And thinks: “I didn’t have a good answer for her. My generation didn’t protest like hers did, but I wasn’t sure if it was because we weren’t aware that we could, or because we were scared to risk what we had, or we — I — just didn’t care enough to get involved.”

In the final pages of the novel, Lillian dares to acknowledge that her beloved West is an imperfect place: “It has been flawed since Juan Pérez and Charles William Barkley thought it needed to be discovered. Since Vancouver and Gray sailed in, and Lewis and Clark came overland and started naming things in their own language, after their own people.” And so on, all the way to Kaori’s parents’ internment, to the stories of “all-Black regiments and redlined neighborhoods.”

With only two shows left, Water Lil begins to find her purpose: “I could brush the snow from the crevasses, and show how we, imperfect, broken, lost, gone, silenced, were always part of the story.” Water Lil may be saying farewell, but after she performs the song she has written about her own life, she has an epiphany: “And then I knew where I would go, what I would do. For in the end, I had sung my song.”

Amanda Eyre Ward is the best-selling author of “The Jetsetters” and “The Lifeguards.” Her new novel, “What We Did for Love,” will be published in 2024.

THE FAREWELL TOUR | By Stephanie Clifford | 352 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $29.99

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The Farewell Tour: A Novel Hardcover – March 7, 2023

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From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise , a “shimmering” ( New York Times Book Review ) novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle that tells the story of one unforgettable woman’s rise in country and western music.

It’s 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 Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and 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, she’ll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.

Exploring one unforgettable woman’s creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world—and an art form—made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date March 7, 2023
• Dimensions 6 x 1.13 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0063251132
• ISBN-13 978-0063251137
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

"Breathtaking . . . . The Farewell Tour is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description." — The New York Times Book Review

"Thought-provoking and entertaining. . . . The Farewell Tour is indeed a redemption tale. But its seemingly predictable arc is disrupted by plenty of smart misdirections and subtexts. Like a particularly sharp country song, it takes clichés and untangles and renews them. . . . Clifford’s emotional acuity is matched by her grasp of country history. . . . The strength of The Farewell Tour is in showing just how much work is required to escape that judgment, to erase the persona and see yourself clearly." — Washington Post

"Terrific, keenly observed....Clifford’s command of country-music history runs deep, and her powers of description are prodigious....There's a song here for sure." — Wall Street Journal

“Seamlessly written, The Farewell Tour reads more like a musician’s confessional memoir than a fictional work. It’s a novel that rock music fans and country music acolytes alike can enjoy—even if they can’t always appreciate one another’s music.” — Southern Review of Books

"A must-read country-music novel. . . . Like a great country tune, The Farewell Tour takes readers on a journey of tough-to-swallow reflection, much-needed self-discovery and plot-twisting closure.” — The Tennessean

"Many details give the book depth, from the history of so-called “hillbilly” music in Washington state during the Great Depression, to rich descriptions of key country figures throughout the genre’s eras. But the most compelling element is the main character herself. Waters is a refreshing and intense artist whose candor kept me rooting for her at every stage. Her story of redemption, unrequited love, and growth brings the reader along on tour. It’s a gig you don’t want to miss." — Nevada Public Radio

"If you ever wondered what would happen if Daisy Jones confronted her past, this book is for you." — Esquire

“A book about music, about country music in particular and the struggle one woman has to achieve stardom in a world dominated by men….but it is so much more than that. Clifford takes the reader on a tour of country music and some of country music’s greatest and most memorable stars, including Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton, as our main character struggles to become a country music legend herself.” — Yakima Herald (Yakima, WA)

"Go places with this country music saga. . . . Clifford takes you into the early generations of country music, to the landscape of eastern Washington state, to the vanished world of mid-century America, and into the heart and mind of a hardscrabble, fiercely independent woman." — The Free Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

“Fine-grain detail, historical import, and emotional heft. . . . Early chapters in Depression-era Walla Walla – where 10-year-old Lil leaves her troubled family – read a bit like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping , while the novel’s exploration of band dynamics would be at home in David Mitchell’s recent Utopia Avenue . . . . Clifford dives deep—genuinely, unapologetically deep." — Post Alley (Seattle)

“Triumphant. . . . Tracing both the rocky start to her farewell tour and her youthful rise to stardom, Clifford introduces readers to a refreshingly alive and authentic protagonist. . . . Both a startling, resonant portrait of a woman creating and living in the male-dominated world of country music and a late-in-life coming-of-age drama that soars with themes of reinvention and redemption.” — Book Reporter

“ The Farewell Tour is rich in historical touches and will appeal to fans of American culture and country music alike. The novel is the second by a New York Times bestselling author with a no-nonsense ear for both narrative and dialog; the style is well-paced and accessible without sacrificing depth. . . .Her final tour stop is both bookend and epiphany for a woman who had sacrificed self-awareness for a life lived in the minds of others. Recommended reading.” — Historical Novel Society

“Years ago, someone told me that you should write as though your characters have immortal souls. I keep trying, but Stephanie Clifford has done it, with a novel that feels like real life, so alive and heartbreakingly authentic. This story is a fictional paean to real survivors, a tribute and a triumph.”  — Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

"Beautifully written, wise, and true, THE FAREWELL TOUR honors the hard-working, hard-living women of country music—their resilience, courage, and powerful devotion to artmaking. I won’t soon forget the indomitable Lillian Waters.” — Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

“What happens when your coming-of-age story begins with your retirement tour? What happens when we become too old to feel young? Stephanie Clifford's novel is about regret, love, despair, country music triumph and failure, and betrayal. It's about ‘the music spreading...out from the migrant camps and down from the mountain towns, over radio waves, into jukeboxes.’ It's about a Nashville where everybody is hungry for fame and a Walla Walla, Washington, where everybody is broken by shame. This is a novel to be read by dusty barlight and wheatfield sunlight. I loved it.” — Sherman Alexie

"Stephanie Clifford nails the character of Depression-era songbird-turned-country crooner Lillian Waters in her fabulous new novel, The Farewell Tour . . . . I saw myself in Lillian’s journey, from the highs to the lows to the numbness, from the bench seat of a roadster rumbling across dirt roads to shiny tour buses humming down interstates. . . . By the last chorus we learn that a life in country is a holy sacrifice to the Gods of hillbilly music—for which The Farewell Tour is a worthy offering." — Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and performer Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show

"A dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey through a half-century of country music….Full of marvelous period details about World War II-era Tacoma, Washington, and its proto-country music scene as well as glitzy 1970s Nashville, Tennessee…. Like a country ballad, this is a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs. ” — BookPage

"Clifford conveys Lillian’s joy in crystalizing an emotion into a song and connecting with a live audience. . . . a moving tribute to the power of country music.” — Publishers Weekly

About the Author

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 Ris e, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice. She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (March 7, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063251132
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063251137
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.13 x 9 inches
• #4,174 in 20th Century Historical Fiction (Books)
• #12,937 in Westerns (Books)
• #43,513 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Stephanie clifford.

Stephanie Clifford is a Loeb-award winning reporter at the New York Times, where she currently covers Brooklyn courts. She joined the Times in 2008 from Inc. magazine, where she was a senior writer. Stephanie grew up in Seattle and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and two cats. EVERYBODY RISE is her first book. Visit her website at http://www.stephanieclifford.net.

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The Farewell Tour

Written by Stephanie Clifford Review by Jackie Drohan

Set over a period extending from the main character’s childhood in the Great Depression to her late singing career in the 1980s, The Farewell Tour is rich in historical touches and will appeal to fans of American culture and country music alike.

The novel is the second by a New York Times bestselling author with a no-nonsense ear for both narrative and dialog; the style is well-paced and accessible without sacrificing depth. The story follows the life and challenging career of Lillian Waters, a country music singer with roots reminiscent of Coal Miner’s Daughter and an arc which resonates more with that of the character played by Bette Midler in The Rose .

Like the latter story, the pseudonymic “Water Lil” opens the novel with a singing tour taking her back to her hometown and forcing her to seek closure in confrontation. Lil is suffering from medical issues with her vocal cords, a device familiar to fans of diva vocalists, and facing the end of her career in her mid-50s as a result. Perhaps the richest characters are the small towns and honky-tonks themselves, giving voice to the surprising and fascinating regional cultural diversity of the American West still discoverable in the last century. The diversity does not disguise the structural racism and sexism of the time, however, and characters such as the Asian-American bluegrass fiddler Kaori, whose parents were shipped to an internment camp during the war, frame Lil’s own struggle to survive in the fact of the conflicting themes of sexualization and shame that marked the public perception of women performers of the time.

Her final tour stop is both book-end and epiphany for a woman who had sacrificed self-awareness for a life lived in the minds of others. Recommended reading.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘The Farewell Tour’ highlights the struggles of women in country music

Stephanie Clifford’s entertaining and enlightening new novel chronicles the ups and downs of a singer over a 40-year career

Underneath the spangly surfaces of country music, there’s a lot of messiness and injustice. In some ways, the genre has been more upfront about that in recent years, especially for female artists; in some ways it has not. The range of acceptable personas for a country singer may have expanded, but personas still dominate, and as Stephanie Clifford shows in her thought-provoking and entertaining new novel, “ The Farewell Tour ,” life for a female country singer can still be, to put it mildly, constricting.

15 country songs by women everyone should know

The book is set in 1980 and centers on Lil, a country singer clinging to a career that’s fading as the genre shifts; she’s a twangy Loretta Lynn-style singer in a slick, Barbara Mandrell world. She has disappeared from the charts while bad-mouthing her fans and earning a reputation for overindulging in pills and whiskey. Meanwhile, a throat polyp is wrecking her voice, one more piece of evidence for her that what she needs and what the world wants don’t agree.

So, as the title explains, she’s hitting the road one last time. In the early chapters, Clifford diligently arranges the pieces that typically add up to a familiar redemption story: the tough-love bandmate who tells her to stop chewing out her fellow musicians and lay off the booze, the up-and-coming fiddler and backup singer to whom she might pass the torch, the final tour stop in her hometown, Walla Walla, Wash., and a reckoning with a past marred by abuse.

“The Farewell Tour” is indeed a redemption tale. But its seemingly predictable arc is disrupted by plenty of smart misdirections and subtexts. Like a particularly sharp country song, it takes cliches and untangles and renews them.

Clifford accomplishes some of this by capturing the constraints of women’s roles in country music in the mid-20th century. Escaping her abusive family as a 10-year-old, Lil heads to Tacoma, where, during World War II, there’s a chance for her (and other women) to occupy performing spots usually claimed by men. (“Sundays at 5 a.m., between reports about weather and Winnipeg wheat prices and Chicago hog markets, I sang songs as the sun came up to the farmer that I used to be.”) She’s a skilled guitarist and a natural at writing songs that capture her experience, but she still has to satisfy the market: “The only stuff women seemed to get on the charts was maudlin, about death and heartbreak.”

Clifford gives Lil a straight-talking, scrappy voice. She’s hard-working and unsentimental. “Pride was a joke. Tips were not,” she says of her double shifts at a diner. But Clifford also knows that every country singer has to put on an act, and Lil is working one, too. As a young girl, she recognized how to use sex to get the guitar she wanted. At 15, she saw “the glint of dull expectation” in the eyes of a radio station manager. Lacking a security deposit for an apartment, she “did what I had to do.” Her capacity to use sex to stay afloat — in the music world and in her personal life — is topped only by the emotional exhaustion it creates.

Music is the sole thing that keeps her whole: A Fender Telecaster, stolen from her violently abusive husband, “seemed made for me, the swell of my thigh matching the curve in its body.” But Clifford subtly shows how a lifetime of transactional living and walled-off feelings takes a toll. Alternating chapters between Lil’s troubled past and her last-hurrah present, Clifford intensifies the feeling of history catching up with her, adding twists that underscore the consequences of trauma and its neglect.

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Clifford’s emotional acuity is matched by her grasp of country history. A host of country legends make cameos throughout “The Farewell Tour”: Lil impresses Buck Owens, who, before he became an icon of the Bakersfield sound, DJed at a small radio station in Puyallup, Wash. Lil duets with Loretta Lynn at the Grand Ole Opry. And across her 40-year career, she takes advantage of the victories female singers made along the way in the ’50s and ’60s — Patsy Cline, Rose Maddox, Dolly Parton — even while recognizing the narrow box in which she and they have been categorized. Lil has a “sexy-divorcee image” to maintain, and a producer only “let me record my own songs when they were about lost love, missed opportunity, poor choices, bad women.”

The stuff about love, opportunity and choices — that’s all true. As for “bad women,” that’s in the eye of the beholder. The strength of “The Farewell Tour” is in showing just how much work is required to escape that judgment, to erase the persona and see yourself clearly.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “ The New Midwest .”

The Farewell Tour

By Stephanie Clifford

Harper. 352 pp. $29.99

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The Farewell Tour: A Historical Novel of One Woman's Life, Love, and Career in Country Music Hardcover – 7 Mar. 2023

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From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise , a "shimmering" ( New York Times Book Review ) novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle that tells the story of one unforgettable woman's rise in country and western music.

It's 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 Lillian's youth--the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville--and 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, she'll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.

Exploring one unforgettable woman's creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world--and an art form--made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date 7 Mar. 2023
• Dimensions 15.24 x 2.87 x 22.86 cm
• ISBN-10 0063251132
• ISBN-13 978-0063251137
• See all details

Product description

"Breathtaking . . . . The Farewell Tour is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford's gift for description." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Thought-provoking and entertaining. . . . The Farewell Tour is indeed a redemption tale. But its seemingly predictable arc is disrupted by plenty of smart misdirections and subtexts. Like a particularly sharp country song, it takes clichés and untangles and renews them. . . . Clifford's emotional acuity is matched by her grasp of country history. . . . The strength of The Farewell Tour is in showing just how much work is required to escape that judgment, to erase the persona and see yourself clearly." -- Washington Post

"Terrific, keenly observed....Clifford's command of country-music history runs deep, and her powers of description are prodigious....There's a song here for sure." -- Wall Street Journal

"Seamlessly written, The Farewell Tour reads more like a musician's confessional memoir than a fictional work. It's a novel that rock music fans and country music acolytes alike can enjoy--even if they can't always appreciate one another's music." -- Southern Review of Books

"A must-read country-music novel. . . . Like a great country tune, The Farewell Tour takes readers on a journey of tough-to-swallow reflection, much-needed self-discovery and plot-twisting closure." -- The Tennessean

"Many details give the book depth, from the history of so-called "hillbilly" music in Washington state during the Great Depression, to rich descriptions of key country figures throughout the genre's eras. But the most compelling element is the main character herself. Waters is a refreshing and intense artist whose candor kept me rooting for her at every stage. Her story of redemption, unrequited love, and growth brings the reader along on tour. It's a gig you don't want to miss." -- Nevada Public Radio

"If you ever wondered what would happen if Daisy Jones confronted her past, this book is for you." -- Esquire

"A book about music, about country music in particular and the struggle one woman has to achieve stardom in a world dominated by men....but it is so much more than that. Clifford takes the reader on a tour of country music and some of country music's greatest and most memorable stars, including Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton, as our main character struggles to become a country music legend herself." -- Yakima Herald (Yakima, WA)

"Go places with this country music saga. . . . Clifford takes you into the early generations of country music, to the landscape of eastern Washington state, to the vanished world of mid-century America, and into the heart and mind of a hardscrabble, fiercely independent woman." -- The Free Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

"Fine-grain detail, historical import, and emotional heft. . . . Early chapters in Depression-era Walla Walla - where 10-year-old Lil leaves her troubled family - read a bit like Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping , while the novel's exploration of band dynamics would be at home in David Mitchell's recent Utopia Avenue . . . . Clifford dives deep--genuinely, unapologetically deep." -- Post Alley (Seattle)

"Triumphant. . . . Tracing both the rocky start to her farewell tour and her youthful rise to stardom, Clifford introduces readers to a refreshingly alive and authentic protagonist. . . . Both a startling, resonant portrait of a woman creating and living in the male-dominated world of country music and a late-in-life coming-of-age drama that soars with themes of reinvention and redemption." -- Book Reporter

" The Farewell Tour is rich in historical touches and will appeal to fans of American culture and country music alike. The novel is the second by a New York Times bestselling author with a no-nonsense ear for both narrative and dialog; the style is well-paced and accessible without sacrificing depth. . . .Her final tour stop is both bookend and epiphany for a woman who had sacrificed self-awareness for a life lived in the minds of others. Recommended reading." -- Historical Novel Society

"Years ago, someone told me that you should write as though your characters have immortal souls. I keep trying, but Stephanie Clifford has done it, with a novel that feels like real life, so alive and heartbreakingly authentic. This story is a fictional paean to real survivors, a tribute and a triumph." -- Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

"Beautifully written, wise, and true, THE FAREWELL TOUR honors the hard-working, hard-living women of country music--their resilience, courage, and powerful devotion to artmaking. I won't soon forget the indomitable Lillian Waters." -- Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

"What happens when your coming-of-age story begins with your retirement tour? What happens when we become too old to feel young? Stephanie Clifford's novel is about regret, love, despair, country music triumph and failure, and betrayal. It's about 'the music spreading...out from the migrant camps and down from the mountain towns, over radio waves, into jukeboxes.' It's about a Nashville where everybody is hungry for fame and a Walla Walla, Washington, where everybody is broken by shame. This is a novel to be read by dusty barlight and wheatfield sunlight. I loved it." -- Sherman Alexie

"Stephanie Clifford nails the character of Depression-era songbird-turned-country crooner Lillian Waters in her fabulous new novel, The Farewell Tour . . . . I saw myself in Lillian's journey, from the highs to the lows to the numbness, from the bench seat of a roadster rumbling across dirt roads to shiny tour buses humming down interstates. . . . By the last chorus we learn that a life in country is a holy sacrifice to the Gods of hillbilly music--for which The Farewell Tour is a worthy offering." -- Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and performer Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show

"A dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey through a half-century of country music....Full of marvelous period details about World War II-era Tacoma, Washington, and its proto-country music scene as well as glitzy 1970s Nashville, Tennessee.... Like a country ballad, this is a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs. " -- BookPage

"Clifford conveys Lillian's joy in crystalizing an emotion into a song and connecting with a live audience. . . . a moving tribute to the power of country music." -- Publishers Weekly

About the Author

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 Ris e, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review editors' choice. She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (7 Mar. 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063251132
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063251137
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 2.87 x 22.86 cm
• 3,636 in American Historical Romance
• 13,819 in Westerns (Books)
• 20,287 in Western & Frontier Romance

About the author

Stephanie clifford.

Stephanie Clifford is a Loeb-award winning reporter at the New York Times, where she currently covers Brooklyn courts. She joined the Times in 2008 from Inc. magazine, where she was a senior writer. Stephanie grew up in Seattle and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and two cats. EVERYBODY RISE is her first book. Visit her website at http://www.stephanieclifford.net.

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THE FAREWELL TOUR

by Stephanie Clifford ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023

A break-your-heart, toe-tapping story that deserves a song of its own.

From a hardscrabble Washington farm to the stage of the Grand Old Opry, this lyrical novel showcases one woman's hunger for stardom as she tries to outrun her past.

Fans of the TV series Nashville will fall under the spell of Lillian Waters, a washed-up country star who drinks and misbehaves while fans prefer the wholesome charms of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Born Lena Thorsell in the 1920s, the daughter of impoverished Swedish immigrants, she leaves home at the improbable age of 10 to make her way in the world. As time passes, her musical talents are revealed, but her simmering anger thwarts career opportunities and healthy relationships and becomes the "repetitive melody" of her life. Yet after decades of touring, her voice damaged, her body wrecked by alcohol, she stages a comeback in the 1980s. Told against the backdrop of history, including job opportunities that opened for women during World War II and the issue of sexism in the music industry in the mid-20th century, Lillian's operatic story highlights how unresolved childhood trauma can permanently alter one's life. Clifford writes with authority about life on the road and the challenges faced by women struggling to make it as singers and musicians. Country music fans will love the name-dropping as Clifford slides Dolly, Loretta, Buck Owens, Charley Pride, and others into this hard-knocks tale. This character-driven novel is sometimes bogged down by a narrative style that frequently recounts events rather than dropping readers into the action. Still, the story shines like a rhinestone-bedazzled costume fit for a country queen.

Pub Date: March 7, 2023

ISBN: 9780063251137

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Stephanie Clifford

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

INTO THE UNCUT GRASS

by Trevor Noah ; illustrated by Sabina Hahn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2024

A sweet bedtime story.

A boy and his stuffed bear head into the woods.

Having captured readers’ attention with Born a Crime (2016), his bestselling memoir of growing up in South Africa, comedian and television host Noah has written a parable about decision-making. As he puts it in a brief prologue, “It’s about disagreements and difference—but it’s also about how we bridge those gaps and find what matters most, whether we’re parents or kids, neighbors, gnomes, or political adversaries. It’s a picture book, but it’s not a children’s book. Rather, it is a book for kids to share with parents and for parents to share with kids.” With plentiful illustrations by Hahn and in language aimed at young listeners, it tells the story of a small boy so impatient to start his Saturday adventures that he rebels against the rules of his household and heads out without brushing his teeth or making his bed, despite the reminders of his stuffed bear, Walter. “We can’t just run away,” protests the bear. “Your mother will miss you. And where will we sleep? And who will make us waffles?” “We’ll build our own house,” the boy responds. “And we’ll grow our own waffles!” From there, the pair go on their walkabout, encountering a garden gnome, a pair of snails, and a gang of animated coins who have lessons to offer about making choices. Though the author suggests in the introduction that adult readers might enjoy the book on their own, those looking for a follow-up to the memoir or a foray into adult fiction should be warned that this is not that book.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024

ISBN: 9780593729960

Page Count: 128

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL FICTION

More by Trevor Noah

by Trevor Noah

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