The Farewell Tour
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clifford (Everybody Rise) recounts the ascent of a Nashville music star in her entertaining latest. After receiving a diagnosis of permanent throat damage, Lillian Waters, a contemporary of Tammy, Loretta, and Dolly, embarks on a farewell tour in 1980. In flashbacks, Clifford traces Lillian's rise from hardscrabble farmer's daughter during the Depression to country music legend. As a young girl, Lillian sings with her sister, Hen, on the family farm. At 10, she strikes out on her own, going on to perform on local radio shows and with various small-time bands, meeting longtime collaborator Charlie Hagerty in 1940, and, by 1958, she's hitched her star to future legend Buck Owens. The road to stardom is long and full of heartache, and, eventually, after an abusive marriage, an abortion, and exploitation by music executives, Lillian finds fame as a 40-year-old. Now, with Charlie once again in the band, Lillian hopes to put the ghosts of her past to bed. Lillian is a memorable, believable creation, but the author's tendency to tell more than show throttles some of the narrative's power. Still, as the tour gets underway, Clifford conveys Lillian's joy in crystalizing an emotion into a song and connecting with a live audience. In the end, Clifford pulls off a moving tribute to the power of country music.
