“It’s one of those books that, when you finish it, you just want to talk to other people about it,” says Bea Carvalho. Carvalho, who is head of books at Waterstones, knows a thing or two about word-of-mouth sales. But the book she is referring to is not the hot new debut or the cool prize-winner of the year. It is a distinctly un-buzzy, quietly profound novel set in the American midwest, published nearly half a century ago: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow.
As the UK’s only nationwide dedicated bookshop chain, Waterstones has power in deciding what we read. Last month, my local branch had a table dedicated to Maxwell’s slim novel, stacked high in two formats: a flapped paperback, and a luxe hardback edition, all cloth binding and silver foil. The sign on the table read “The new Stoner?”, referring to John Williams’s 1965 novel, which became a surprise bestseller in 2013.
Last year, Carvalho says, So Long, See You Tomorrow sold “a few hundred copies” in Waterstones. In 2025, it has been flying off the shelves (and dedicated tables). Waterstones wouldn’t share current sales figures, but Vintage Classics, the imprint of Penguin through which it is published, says it has sold more than 30,000 copies in the last 12 months – uncommon for any literary novel; unheard of for a backlist title.
What is behind the surprising rise of a 45-year-old novel by a little-known author? Maxwell, who died in 2000 at the age of 91, was the author of six novels; So Long, See You Tomorrow being the final one, and widely regarded as his best. Still, it is quiet and subtle, “not an obvious candidate for a breakout hit”, as Nick Skidmore, publishing director of Vintage Classics, concedes.
The root of the book’s success goes back to 1997, when it was first published in the UK in paperback. Christopher MacLehose, who published it with Harvill Press, agrees with Carvalho on the book’s appeal: “Everyone who read it said [to others], ‘This is a book you have to read.’ And there aren’t so many like that.”
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Back then, the book was supported by enthusiastic quotes from Michael Ondaatje and Richard Ford, and reviewed positively. The Observer’s own Erica Wagner, then literary editor of the Times, says she “went all in on [Maxwell] and I’m glad I did”. The book sold reasonably well, but that, for the time being, was that.
The story of So Long is simple on the surface. An unnamed narrator in old age – ostensibly Maxwell himself – is looking back to his childhood in rural Illinois in the 1920s. He is traumatised by the death of his mother in the 1918 flu epidemic and by the loss of a friendship following a terrible crime.
The immediate appeal of the book is in its deep hooks: there is a murder (a pistol shot rings out on the first page), a love triangle, the impenetrable mysteries of the human heart. But the novel is also about shame and atonement and, as Skidmore says, “like [Stoner], it’s about what it means to have lived an adequate life”.
The murderer in the story is farmer Clarence Smith, whose wife was having an affair with the murder victim; Smith’s teenage son, Cletus, is best friends with the narrator. The friends would part each evening with “So long” and “See you tomorrow” – but the murder cuts short their relationship. The last time the narrator sees Cletus, in a school corridor: “He didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. We just kept on walking until we had passed each other.” They never speak again.
This failure to reach out to his friend, who was suffering because of his father’s crime, haunts the narrator even into old age. He tries to make amends by imagining the story of Cletus and his family, as well as others in the community – even a family dog. It is, in Skidmore’s words, “a literary experiment in empathy. It’s about human connection and how we touch each other despite the silence and repression and fear.” The book appeals, he suggests, because “human connection is maybe something we’re lacking in daily life”.
Maxwell was writing from experience. His mother did die of flu in 1918 – he caught it too, but survived. “I recall so, so clearly how the flu epidemic had scarred him,” says Wagner, who interviewed Maxwell shortly before his death. And there really was a figure like Cletus Smith in his life. “I was sitting at my desk,” Maxwell told the Paris Review in 1982, “and something made me think of that boy I had failed to speak to, and thinking of him I winced.” Having a response “so acute” after many decades made Maxwell want to investigate it; the result is the novel.
Maxwell’s fiction was frequently autobiographical. Of his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, he said: “The whole of my youth is in it.” He was born in 1908 and grew up in Illinois where, following his mother’s death, he lived with an aunt and uncle. After teaching English for two years at the University of Illinois, he joined the New Yorker, where he was an editor for 40 years, working with writers including John Cheever, Sylvia Townsend Warner and John Updike. But “editing was his day job”, says novelist Richard Ford, an admirer of Maxwell’s work. “He was more important as a prose writer.”
‘It’s about human connection and how we touch each other despite the silence, repression and fear’
Another longtime fan of So Long is the writer David Nicholls. “I do really love it,” he says. “It’s the novel I pick up when I want to remember what good prose can do.” It is a book about memory, and how – as the narrator says – “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw”. When the narrator imagines his lost friend Cletus’s story, he is inventing – but as readers we want to believe it, because we need life to make sense. It is one of the contradictions in the book, a friction that gives it energy. For Nicholls, “it has the feel of a classic, but the insights and playfulness feel very modern”.
These multiple facets help the book appeal to a wide readership. It sets traditional prose against a complex story – an invention that nonetheless provides emotional truth – and it packs a lot into a small space. For Ford, the brevity of this “gigantic little novel” is part of its importance. “To me, the great American novel is the great American short novel: think Gatsby, Fat City, The End of the Road, Play It As It Lays,” he tells me. “To purport to write a short novel at all is an act of audacity.” And what the book does not say – what the narrator cannot know, so must invent – is as important as what it does. “There is a constant nervy feeling [in the novel],” adds Ford, “which signals to the reader, ‘This almost cannot be articulated, so charged [is it] by the unsayable about family, about the psychic, emotional contextualising of locale and of youth and the urge to transgress.’”
A love for Maxwell’s novel has been present all along, accumulating through successive generations of readers and critics. The wave had been building, and it took just one man to help it break: the TV presenter and writer Graham Norton. In November 2024, Norton appeared on BBC2’s book show Between the Covers and recommended So Long, See You Tomorrow to viewers.
“We saw an uplift [in sales] in December and then it sustained into January and February,” says Skidmore. Norton initiated the surge in So Long’s popularity, but readers’ word of mouth soon took over. Although it’s an old book, “most books are new to most people”, points out Bea Carvalho, and the book’s intimacy and what Skidmore calls its “timeless quality – it doesn’t speak to a moment or trend” means it feels like a personal discovery for each new reader.
But there is canny marketing here, too. Once sales started to grow, Vintage gave the book a new jacket, and Waterstones, spurred by support for the book among its booksellers, also got behind it. In May, a Waterstones TikTok video about So Long received 360,000 views, and the novel was shortlisted for the chain’s book of the year. Vintage collaborated with Waterstones on an exclusive “pretty and gifty” (as Carvalho puts it) hardback edition, though – Skidmore quickly adds – “other retailers have been incredibly supportive as well”.
Still, So Long is not quite a literary universal solvent. One comment on the Waterstones TikTok video says, “I read two pages. It’s so old-white-man, I can’t.” Well, Maxwell was an old man – in his seventies – when he wrote it, so “it carries the heft of a life lived” says Skidmore. “All of us carry biases and privileges but there are also fundamental lessons that people who have lived are able to share.”
The durability of So Long would have pleased Maxwell, who wanted “language that doesn’t disintegrate”. As he told the Paris Review in 1982: “Write sentences that won’t be like sandcastles.” And as a man? He was, says Christopher MacLehose, “the most charming human being that you would ever remember – an absolute delight”. Consistent with the restraint of his writing style, he was “a shy person”, MacLehose continues, and “very formal – you would have to say an old-fashioned man”. (Maxwell wore a blazer and tie to be interviewed by the Paris Review.) For Erica Wagner, “the truly great writers I have met can be numbered in the single figures – Maxwell may well be at the very top”.
Not that the modest Maxwell would have allowed such high praise. “I think I write for myself,” he said simply, “and I’m astonished that strangers are moved by it.” As the success of So Long, See You Tomorrow suggests, they will continue to be moved by it for many years to come.
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is published by Vintage Classics (£9.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £8.99. Delivery charges may apply
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Photography by Granger