Elegy, Southwest

(Paperback)

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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 Lewiss 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.

PRAISE FOR ELEGY, SOUTHWEST

enormously impressive Guardian

A big rangy classic novel that knows wisdom is intimate its cut with pointillist detail, leaves stopovers for apocalypses, and its 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 ofShirley

This book is a fever dream, a mood, a spell, an entire climatefilled with a particular kind of desert winter light harsh, unsparing, and beautiful. Honestly, I feel that part of me is still actually living in the book. Tremendously moving. Leslie Jamison,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Recovering

Wattssensitive and beautifully wrought observations on the environment, love, and loss are perfectly and painfully attuned to our shifting world. This is an astounding, heartbreaking, and important book. Youll be different after reading it. Elvia Wilk, author ofDeath by Landscape

An elegant and urgentloveletterto art, writing and our dying natural world. Elegy, Southwest is astunning and tragic story about love, death and everything in between. Victoria Hannan, author of Kokomo

Madeleine Watts is a methodical, soulful alarmist, spooling out perceptive, trance-like sentences. Her strikingly brilliant novel is a measured fever dream of loneliness private, political, razor-smart, and utterly engulfing. Heidi Julavits, author ofThe Vanishers

Reviews

Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist. * Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries *
Full of grit and a vivid, tender affection for the environments of the American West, Watts urgent novel weaves a lush landscape of grief and solace. I've rarely seen a writer capture the atmosphere of climate change and loss so vividly, or the frenzied urge to leap into some form of action all in prose that kept me glued to its pages right to the bittersweet end. * Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun *
Elegy, Southwest is a novel composed of the details that accumulate in the wake of loss: of a relationship, of a weather pattern, of a moment in time. Watts elegantly weaves a love story with deep research on its cinematic setting to ask a poignant question: What do you do with all that remains from the tragedy of hyper-specificmemories, to photographs, to the electronic devices we use to track our health data after something ends
* Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts *
Watts has written an elegiac novel that wanders through altered landscapes and memory to perceptively chart the meandering course of grief amidst immense loss. Elegy, Southwest is an intimate chronicle of fragile lives confronting the vastness of the natural sublime and the meaning of love. * Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain *
Madeline Watts is an uncommonly perceptive and daring writer. Her sensitivity to the grief of this specific territory, the desert Southwest, and its people is a profound gift. * Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But Ive Chosen Darkness *
Haunting and hypnotic, absorbing and provocative, Elegy, Southwest is the novel Ive been waiting for. Watts cool, precise prose calls to mind Joan Didion and Alexandra Kleeman, but this singular novel is something new, entirely. New and breathtaking. * Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year *
Elegy, Southwestis a haunting meditation on the enduring nature of love in the face of cascading lossesthose we can see coming and those we cant. The interior landscapes in Watts wise exploration of art and scholarship and science are just as complex and threatened, just as precarious, as the river Eloise studies so closely. A truly captivating and lovely novel. * Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity *
Bursting with ideas and emotion, this is an accomplished tale of self-examination. * Publishers Weekly *
The power of Elegy, Southwest resides in its unflinching consideration of the question of how we should make sense of our lives now. * The Conversation *
Elegy, Southwestis a book that feels as vast and open as the US desert. Youre uncomfortably aware of the heat just as often as the characters are, and yet you keep ignoring it to follow the love story, just as they do. * Artshub *

Author Bio

MadeleineWattsis a writer of fiction, stories, and essays. Her debut novel,The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.Her writing has been published inHarpers Magazine,The Believer,HEAT,The White Review,Literary Hub,The Paris Review Daily,Los Angeles Review of Books,The Irish Times,Bookforum, andMeanjinamong others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition.

Madeleinegrew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne. After a decade living in New York, she is now based in Berlin.

Elegy, Southwestis her second novel.