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  • Published: 3 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099560937
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.00

So Long, See You Tomorrow




An extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of American'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.

  • Published: 3 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099560937
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.00

About the author

William Maxwell

William Maxwell (1908-2000) was born in Illinois. 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 40 years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O'Hara, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty. His novel, So Long Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and in 1995 he received the PEN/Malamud Award.

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Praise for So Long, See You Tomorrow

A truly extraordinary novel... Maxwell has tapped a vein of strange, pure emotion

Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

Maxwell does something all great novelists do: he conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity

Anthony Quinn, Observer

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

This calm, reflective and extraordinarily beautiful novel offers American fiction at its finest

Irish Times

Maxwell's voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest

John Updike

So magically deft at being profound...possesses that daunting quality impossible to emulate: it makes greatness seem simple

Richard Ford

Maxwell is one of the past half-century's unmistakably great novelists

Village Voice

Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America's twentieth century, and they do not fade

Times Literary Supplement