The Apology Tour

A luminous, deeply moving novel about the stories we steal, the people we use, and the long road back to the ones we owe. For forty years, Eleanor Ashby was one of America's most beloved novelists. Then the world learned the truth about the book that made her: her masterpiece was never invented.

It was her younger sister's life — her grief, her secret, her voice — taken without permission and sold to strangers as fiction. Now Eleanor is a widow. She is disgraced. And she is dying. So she does the only thing a lifetime of writing has taught her to do with an ending: she makes a list.

The name of every person she ever turned into a character, every friend and stranger she mined for a scene, every door she owes an apology she can no longer put off.

And with her nineteen-year-old granddaughter — a girl she has never met, who agrees to drive for reasons of her own — Eleanor points her late husband's car west and sets out to say she is sorry, in person, all the way across the country. Town by town, apology by apology, the tour carries her toward the one name at the bottom of the list. The hardest one.

The one an apology can never be enough to answer — and the one she has spent her whole life driving away from.

Told in two braided timelines — the last road of Eleanor's life, and the long-ago summer that made her — The Apology Tour is an unforgettable story of art and theft, sisters and silence, and whether the truest thing we can offer another person might also be the only thing we have left to give.

A profoundly moving book-club novel about guilt, forgiveness, and the true cost of a good story.