So Long, See You Tomorrow

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers--one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy--has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys--now a grown man--tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/03/1996
ISBN: 9780679767206
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.50d
Award: National Book Awards - Winner

Review Citations: New York Times 02/04/1996 pg. 32
New York Times 06/16/1996 pg. 48
New York Times 02/11/1996 pg. 32
Newsweek 02/18/2008 pg. 17
Newsweek 12/08/2008 pg. 14