Stay Gone Days

“Setting up a smooth structure and writing in relaxed prose, Yarbrough manages to convey the rhythms of everyday life along with the characters’ trauma. Readers will enjoy getting caught up in these two women’s faltering lives.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Masterful and moving, Stay Gone Days is the story of the diverging yet ultimately intertwined destinies of two sisters, told on a scale both intimate and sweeping. I followed them across continents and decades, through loves and losses, always on the edge of my seat. I finished with tears in my eyes and wonder in my heart.” —JULIA GLASS

“There is so much to praise about this novel: the vivid, precise language, the expansiveness of the settings, how deeply we come to care about Caroline and Ella. But it all leads to this: we enter many books, but only a few enter us, then lodge in our consciousness as deeply as lived memories. Stay Gone Days is one of these. Steve Yarbrough is one of our country’s finest living novelists.” —RON RASH

After a childhood in Mississippi marred by a horrific family scandal, teenage sisters Ella and Caroline Cole escape their hometown, losing all connection to each other. While Ella finds stable domesticity in Boston, Caroline travels the world, from California to Poland, fleeing regrets and a man intent on violence. Despite the decades apart, each sister is never far from the other’s thoughts. Then, one day, Ella walks into a bookstore and sees a novel called Stay Gone Days. Will this novel, a heartbreaking tale of estranged sisters, help Ella and Caroline find each other and start down the hard road of reconciliation and forgiveness?

STEVE YARBROUGH is the author of twelve books, including the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.