Elegy, Southwest

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.

‘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 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. Honestly, I feel that part of me is still actually living in the book. Tremendously moving.’ LESLIE JAMISON, New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering

‘An elegant and urgent love letter to art, writing and our dying natural world. A stunning and tragic story about love, death and everything in between.’ VICTORIA HANNAN, author of Kokomo

‘Her strikingly brilliant novel is a measured fever dream of loneliness – private, political, razor-smart, and utterly engulfing.’ HEIDI JULAVITS, author of The Vanishers

‘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.’ LAUREN OYLER, author of Fake Accounts

‘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 I’ve Chosen Darkness

‘Haunting and hypnotic, absorbing and provocative, this is the novel I’ve been waiting for. New and breathtaking.’ JOANNA RAKOFF, author of My Salinger Year

‘A haunting meditation on the enduring nature of love in the face of cascading losses – those we can see coming and those we can’t. A truly captivating and lovely novel.’ CLAIRE BOYLES, author of Site Fidelity

© 2025 Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd (دفتر الصوت ): 9781004202072

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