Sterling Vail · Novelist

Stories about what survives.

Dark literary fiction about memory, identity, family, betrayal, and the lives people build after everything familiar breaks.

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The Next Time I See Y’all · Available now · Kindle Edition · $4.99.

Cover of The Next Time I See Y’all by Sterling Vail: an unfinished A-frame house at night with a pale moon framed through the upper opening.
Debut Novel · Kindle Edition · $4.99

The Next Time I See Y’all

At fourteen, Maurice learns the first rule of survival: never need a room someone else can take away.

Years later, betrayal tears through the family he thought was finally his, and Maurice does what he has always done best: he disappears. What returns is Ty—richer, colder, nearly unrecognizable, and carrying a record of every lie, debt, and softened version of the past left behind.

But revenge is only the surface. Beneath the money, the masks, and the reckoning is a harder question: what happens to a man who has spent his whole life believing love always comes with an invoice?

A dark, intimate novel about abandonment, survival, identity, memory, and the terrifying possibility that being loved without conditions may be harder to accept than being betrayed.

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About Sterling Vail

Sterling Vail

Sterling Vail writes fiction about identity, loyalty, memory, betrayal, survival, and the choices people make when the lives they were given no longer fit.

His work is shaped by a Midwestern sensibility—small towns, long roads, old houses, hard winters, quiet rooms, and the kind of places where people learn to notice what is not being said. There is often a country stillness beneath his stories, even when the world around his characters becomes dangerous, intimate, or impossibly complicated.

Vail’s fiction moves between families, relationships, hidden histories, fractured loyalties, and the private worlds people build to survive what cannot be undone. He is drawn to characters caught between love and obligation, secrecy and truth, violence and tenderness, and to the distance between who people are, who others believe them to be, and who they become when circumstance finally forces a choice.

Jazz is part of the rhythm of that storytelling: variation, return, silence, improvisation, tension, and the meaning created between notes. His stories often circle back to ordinary things—a room, a road, a song, a gesture—until they carry more weight than they did the first time.

Whether intimate or expansive, domestic or international, Vail’s work is concerned with long memory, moral consequence, complicated loyalties, and the extraordinary weight ordinary human relationships can carry.

The Next Time I See Y’all is his debut novel.

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