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A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.
In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.
Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis's descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.
Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.
"Bursting with ideas and emotion, this is an accomplished tale of self-examination." —Publishers Weekly
"A quiet and sweeping portrait of a marriage teetering on the edge." —Kirkus Reviews
"The personal drama in Watts' second novel is inseparable from the environmental; this is love at the end of the world. Watts effectively contrasts the gorgeous flora and fauna of the American Southwest with the region's unique, characteristic precariousness. Recalling the sunny haze of Joan Didion's work, the duality of life is everywhere: joy and pain, pregnancy and death, art and science. Literary fiction ready for a changing world." —Booklist
"This book is a fever dream, a mood, a spell, an entire climate filled with a particular kind of desert winter light, harsh and unsparing and beautiful. Honestly, I feel that part of me is still actually living in the book, it casts such a strong and palpable mood, or sphere of resonance. It holds global crises and individual subjectivity so fiercely and necessarily in the same frame, its nerve endings attuned, at once, to global catastrophe and private anguish, collapsing the delusion of their separate spheres and never pushing wonder and curiosity from view. It's tremendously moving." —Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering
"A big rangy classic novel that knows wisdom is intimate - it's cut with pointillist detail, leaves stopovers for apocalypses, and it's told with a voice that just aches. In this grim, wise and yearning book, Madeleine Watts takes us on a road trip for the end times." —Ronnie Scott, author of Shirley
This information about Elegy, Southwest was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Madeleine Watts is the author of The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It was awarded the Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her nonfiction has been published extensively in Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, and Astra Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities.
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