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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