Memory. Loss. Longing.
  • Elegy, Southwest
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Elegy, Southwest

Madeleine Watts

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 the Author

Madeleine Watts is a writer of fiction, stories, and essays. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her writing has been published in Harper’s MagazineThe BelieverHEATThe White ReviewLiterary HubThe Paris Review DailyLos Angeles Review of BooksThe Irish TimesBookforum, and Meanjin among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition.

Madeleine grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne. After a decade living in New York, she is now based in Berlin.

Elegy, Southwest is her second novel.

Praise

‘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

 

Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist.’ – Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries

 

‘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, 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. Elegy, Southwest 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

ISBN
9781761153136

Format
Paperback

Cost
$34.99

Pub Date
March 2025

Extent
288pp

Rights
ANZ

Category
Fiction

Themes
Memory. Loss. Longing.