elegy, Southwest
forthcoming february 18, 2025 [US & Canada] // march 5, 2025 [australia/NZ] // march 13, 2025 [uk]
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.
For US press and publicity, please contact Shannon Hennessey at Simon & Schuster at shannon.hennessey@simonandschuster.com
For UK press and publicity, please contact Emily Goulding at Pushkin Press at emily@pushkinpress.com
For Australian/NZ press and publicity, please contact Zoe Victoria at Ultimo Press at zoevictoria@ultimopress.com
Reviews
"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
"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. Watts is a prescient tour guide to human frailty, and to the climate apocalypse, and her voice is one we will most want to listen to, as people and landscapes collide with greater and great frequency and force." — Heidi Julavits
“Watts’ sensitive 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. You’ll be different after reading it.” — Elvia Wilk
“Madeleine 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
"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
"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
"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
"An elegant and urgent love letter to art, writing and our dying natural world. Elegy, Southwest is a stunning and tragic story about love, death and everything in between." — Victoria Hannan
“Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist.” — Ellena Savage
“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.” — Lauren Oyler
“Elegy, Southwest is 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. The interior landscapes in Watt’s 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
“Haunting and hypnotic, absorbing and provocative, Elegy, Southwest is the novel I've 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