March Staff Pick: The Farewell Tour

The Farewell Tour by Stephanie Clifford (Harper, March 7), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

***Now out in paperback!***

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.

Allison enjoyed both the book and audiobook versions of this novel. She writes, “Stephanie Clifford fills out the singular story of one woman’s hard rise to country music stardom with the history of country music and the evolution of American culture. Water Lil is a character you won’t soon forget.”

“This well researched novel is also a love letter to country music and the west. If you’ve spent time with either, this novel will be hell bent on tugging at your heartstrings.”

Allison’s playlist for the book includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the song “Bo Weavil Blues” is central to the novel).