Tomorrow Is Forever A Novel

A wife and mother grapples with love and loss in World War II–era Hollywood in a New York Times–bestselling author’s emotional tour de force.

For two decades, Elizabeth Herlong has been a devoted wife, supporting her husband as he built an empire in Hollywood’s budding motion picture industry. But far from the bright glamour of her current life, World War II rages in Europe, forcing Elizabeth to remember her past, awakening feelings and longings she thought she would never experience again. Most of all, she fears for her eldest son, who will turn eighteen in less than a year and have to enlist in the army.
 
Then one night, Elizabeth’s husband introduces her to a German screenwriter he’s been working with. Erich Kessler is a disabled veteran of World War I attempting to make a new life for himself. Something in his face stirs Elizabeth’s heart—setting her on a journey of discovery about the meaning of true love and the things that war cannot destroy.
 
Made into a film starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, this is a novel of a woman haunted by the shadows of war both past and present, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Jubilee Trail, Deep Summer, and other acclaimed novels.
 

Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (Celia Garth) and the great California gold rush (Calico Palace), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing—novels and screenplays.

After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of Deep Summer, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels Jubilee Trail, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction, Golden Dreams. Her novel Tomorrow Is Forever also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.