So Long, See You Tomorrow

Description

An extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of American's greatest novelists Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists. In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret. **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

William Maxwell was born in Illinois in 1908. He was the author of a distinguished body of work- six novels, three short story collections, an autobiographical memoir and a collection of literary essays and reviews. A New Yorker editor for forty years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O'Hara and Eudora Welty. So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and he received the PEN/Malamud Award. He died in New York in 2000.

One of the great books of our age. It is the subtlest of miniatures that contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love - all caught in a clear, simple style in perfect brushstrokes -- Michael Ondjaate A truly extraordinary novel... Maxwell has tapped a vein of strange, pure emotion -- Philip Hensher * Mail on Sunday * So magically deft at being profound...possesses that daunting quality impossible to emulate: it makes greatness seem simple -- Richard Ford Maxwell does something all great novelists do: he conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity -- Anthony Quinn * Observer * This calm, reflective and extraordinarily beautiful novel offers American fiction at its finest * Irish Times *