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.

‘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. A stunning and tragic story about love, death and everything in between.’ VICTORIA HANNAN, author of Kokomo

‘Her strikingly brilliant novel is a measured fever dream of loneliness–private, political, razor-smart, and utterly engulfing.’ HEIDI JULAVITS, author of The Vanishers

‘An expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist.’ ELLENA SAVAGE, author of Blueberries

‘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, author of Fake Accounts

‘Watts has written an elegiac novel that wanders through altered landscapes and memory to perceptively chart the meandering course of grief amidst immense loss. This is an intimate chronicle of fragile lives confronting the vastness of the natural sublime and the meaning of love.’ PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain

‘Madeline 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, author of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness

‘Haunting and hypnotic, absorbing and provocative, this 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, author of My Salinger Year

‘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, author of Site Fidelity