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.

PRAISE FOR ELEGY, SOUTHWEST

‘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, 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

‘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, author of Death by Landscape

‘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, 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 of The Vanishers