Stay Gone Days: A Novel

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?

“Masterful and moving, Steve Yarbrough’s 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

“The best writers, as with the best musicians and athletes, make excellence appear effortless. Such is the case in Steve Yarbrough’s new novel. Nothing in STAY GONE DAYS feels imposed or contrived; there is no judgement or agenda. Instead, it is as if the story is telling itself, the characters free agents of their own lives. We cannot dispel the notion that instead of reading about life, we are within life. There is so much more 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

“Wrapped in the heartbreak of a cleaved family, Yarbrough’s latest is tender toward the Cole sisters and the people they love. Stay Gone Days is a meditation on blood and chosen family and the complicated, if beautiful, space where the two intersect.”—BuzzFeedNews

“Steve Yarbrough’s latest novel Stay Gone Days offers a profound exploration of the insidious power of shame to fracture individual, family, and communal life—and of the power of storytelling to heal those ruptures.”—Jackson Clarion Ledger

“I find Yarbrough a wonderfully classic storyteller in the manner of other writers, like Richard Bausch, Rick Bass, and T. C. Boyle. Still, Yarbrough’s story is filled with postmodernist touches—flash-forwards and an element akin to Charles Baxter’s metafictional technique in The Soul Thief, which is more than a story within a story: it is the story.”—The Brooklyn Rail

“Wise, tender, and honest, Stay Gone Days forces readers to confront the inevitability of aging and the choices we make to maintain or sever family ties. It also forces us to consider the long-term residue that remains long after we leave our childhood homes.”—Rain Taxi

“A rich and meticulously crafted story. . . The prose is gentle, with a steady flow that is inviting and captivating. . . Truly excellent .” —Memphis Commercial Appeal

“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