Elegy, Southwest

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

‘enormously impressive’ – Guardian

‘Elegy, Southwest reminds us there is equal drama and heartbreak to be found in the unspoken on the road not taken.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

‘an accomplished novel, beautifully crafted and complex in its layerings and shifts in scale’ – The Saturday Paper

‘This is a beautifully lonely novel. Moving between the intimate address of the past and the present, it builds toward a devastating, deeply poignant ending.’ – ABC 

‘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

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
‘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, author of Something New Under the Sun
‘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. 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, 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
‘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, 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, author of My Salinger Year
‘Elegy, Southwest is 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
Bursting with ideas and emotion, this is an accomplished tale of self-examination. Publishers Weekly
The power of Elegy, Southwest resides in its unflinching consideration of the question of how we should make sense of our lives now. The Conversation
Elegy, Southwest is a book that feels as vast and open as the US desert. You’re uncomfortably aware of the heat just as often as the characters are, and yet you keep ignoring it to follow the love story, just as they do. Artshub
‘sad and funny, grand and intimate, informed and inquisitive, and above all, a beautiful piece of writing’ Readings
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
‘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

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 Magazine, The Believer, HEAT, The White Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Bookforum, 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.

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