About the Book
'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
About the Author :
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.
Review :
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
Astonishingly and chillingly prescient. . . This is a rare kind of writing where every page offers something to linger on, beautiful and devastating in equal measure
Haunting and precise . . . Watts gracefully blends crises both personal and political, bodily and environmental
This is the second time Watts has submerged her fiction in a mythic body of water (see her debut novel, The Inland Sea, 2020). The Australian-born author knows precisely what she is doing, and she does it with exquisite precision.
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 - specific memories, to photographs, to the electronic devices we use to track our "health data" -after something ends?
As the name suggests, this was never a journey that was going to end well. It's a credit to Watts' skills as a writer that she's able to foreshadow that so plausibly, while still keeping us guessing as to just what exactly the end - and its cost - will be. Tender and hauntingly sad
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
Her 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
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
Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist
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
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
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
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
A married couple on a road trip in the American Southwest reckon with the problems with their relationship, a possible pregnancy, and imminent climate catastrophe. This book promises to be the perfect showcase for Watts' considerable skill at rendering humanity amid climate grief
Part searing love story, part thought-provoking chronicle on climate change, Watts's narrative is a lament for loss
Make particular space on your 2025 to-read pile for Madeleine Watts' Elegy, Southwest. It's a road-trip novel that unfolds against the backdrop of California wildfires. In the Anthropocene, all fiction is eco-fiction.
While the wildfires rage on the horizon, the couple take an unforgettable journey through the desert, battling the vastness of nothing, dangerous droughts and the fracturing of their relationship. A profound novel that looks at grief of this territory and of parental loss
