Elegy, Southwest

Reviews / Votes

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, author of Splinters 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 * FT * Powerful, poignant and suffused with millennial dread. . . A young couple encounter catastrophic fires and ruined rivers on a California road trip, searching for art and hope in a darkening world * Guardian * Haunting and precise . . . Watts gracefully blends crises both personal and political, bodily and environmental * Spectator * 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. * TLS * 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? -- Lauren Oyler 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 * Marie Claire * 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 -- Alexandra Kleeman 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 -- Elvia Wilk 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 -- Heidi Julavits Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist -- Ellena Savage 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 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 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 -- Joanna Rakoff 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 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 * Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2025 * Part searing love story, part thought-provoking chronicle on climate change, Watts's narrative is a lament for loss * Collagerie * 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. * Guardian Australia * 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 * Service95 *