Elegy, Southwest

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A01=Madeleine Watts
American Southwest
Australian Fiction
Author_Madeleine Watts
Category=FBA
Climate Fiction
Desert
Environmental Catastrophe
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
Fiction About Art
Grief
Grieving a Parent
Health Anxiety
Literary Fiction
Love Story
Mental Health
Missed Period
Portrait of Marriage
Pregnancy
Relationship Breakdown
Road Trip Novel
The Colorado River
Unplanned Pregnancy
Wildfires

Product details

  • ISBN 9781805337621
  • Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 13 Mar 2025
  • Publisher: Pushkin Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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'This book is a fever dream, a mood, a spell, an entire climate filled with a particular kind of desert winter light - harsh, unsparing, and beautiful' Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

'Astonishingly and chillingly prescient . . . a rare kind of writing where every page offers something to linger on' FT

Eloise has known only two great loves: her husband, Lewis, and the desert. An academic living in Brooklyn, she is mesmerized by tales of the American Southwest, that paradise built on quicksand with less water every passing year. When the couple set out on a road trip tracing the course of the Colorado River, Eloise researches its lakes and dams, while Lewis grieves his mother in the prickly wasteland where he never felt quite at home.

Together they cruise past gaping canyons, glittering casinos and motels gone to seed, travelling through the red-gold light of nearby wildfires. They are young and they have each other, and for a moment the whole world seems to shimmer with glorious possibility. But within the close confines of the car a chasm starts to open between them.

This is a hauntingly beautiful love story about the mystery of other people - at once an excavation of a relationship, and an elegy for a desert running dry.

PRAISE FOR ELEGY, SOUTHWEST:

'Exquisite'TLS

'Haunting and precise' Spectator

'Profound' Service95

'Astounding, heartbreaking, and important' Elvia Wilk

'Strikingly brilliant' Heidi Julavits

'An expansive, ambitious novel' Ellena Savage

Madeleine Watts is the author of The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the 2021 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, Literary Hub, and Astra Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Born in Sydney, Australia, she lives between New York and Berlin.

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