Elegy, Southwest: A Novel - Hardcover

Watts, Madeleine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668051621 ISBN 13: 9781668051627

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Madeleine Watts is the author of The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the 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 Daily, Literary Hub, and Astra Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668051621
• ISBN 13: 9781668051627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288