The Farewell Tour

A Novel

By: Stephanie Clifford

Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie

Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Stephanie Clifford (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

Second book did NOT disappoint

I loved Everybody Rise and didn’t know what to expect with TFT, as its premise was so different. It was beautifully written with imagery that leapt off the page. The performance was perfect and the story so beautifully written. It had me at page one and I was so sad to say goodbye to Water Lil in the end. I truly hope this winds up in film at some point.

A good story about country music

As well as being a good story, this novel is very thought provoking. An excellent listen.

Sneaks up on you

Wow, what a surprise… this book seemed like such a departure from the last that I wasn’t sure I’d like it. So glad I gave it a chance! It’s not an exaggeration: this book is a literary gem and a study of fine storytelling. The songs were a perfect vehicle to drive the plot forward and resolve unanswered questions. I’m not one to write reviews these days unless something really stands out as exceptional. This book was unexpectedly moving, so subtly profound. Five stars.

Country music

Good story spanning several decades, with historical background reflecting the changes in the USA socially and culturally. Unfortunately, the main character, Lil, was just so abrasive and self-sabotaging that it was grating. Credit to the narrator for bringing out Lil‘s personality so vividly.

Country music, yes, but more

I realized by the end of this book how much I appreciated it. I'm not a country music fan so I did not appreciate fully many of the references to singers and stars, and the quality of the music. I like a book that can be taken on a number of levels. If you are a country music fan you can fully enjoy the characters real and fictionalized. If you like strong female characters you will enjoy the characters as they make choices to survive, succeed and thrive and many times fail. If you want to dig deeper you can see it as an allegory, how we as individuals and as a country fool ourselves into believing certain things in order to be more comfortable in our own skin and what we do to sell ourselves to others in order to be accepted. I like that this was a good story about relationships that did not wrap it in a love story. I thought the narrator was perfect as the main character. This was worth the credit.