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The Farewell Tour: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
AUDIOBOOK FEATURES EXCERPTS FROM FOUR ORIGINAL SONGS WRITTEN AND COMPOSED BY THE AUTHOR
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise, a rich and riveting 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.
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"“Clifford nails the character of Depression-era songbird-turned-country crooner Lillian Waters…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.”"
— Ketch Secor, Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and performer of Old Crow Medicine Show
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“Carrington MacDuffie offers an excellent performance of this audiobook, lending ‘Water Lil’ an appropriate rough-around-the-edges aura that suits her hardscrabble past.”
— AudioFile -
“A shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A moving tribute to the power of country music.”
— Publishers Weekly -
"A bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships, and heartfelt songs.”
— BookPage -
“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.”
— Southern Review of Books -
“The Farewell Tour is indeed a redemption tale. But its seemingly predictable arc is disrupted by plenty of smart misdirections and subtexts.”
— Washington Post -
“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
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Out in Paperback
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About Stephanie Clifford
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 writes long-form investigations about criminal justice and business for the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Elle, the London Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other publications. Everybody Rise, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice.
About Carrington MacDuffie
Carrington MacDuffie is a voice actor and recording artist who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has been a frequent finalist for the Audie Award, including for her original audiobook, Many Things Invisible. Alongside her narration work, she has released a new album of original songs, Only an Angel.