Description

‘The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx’ Vogue
‘Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true’ Joy Williams

A desert scorched feminist eco-novel, Yellow Pine is about a self-determined pioneer woman romping into her forties and recovering from her rugged individualism.

Rose is a divorced, disillusioned Sierra Club staffer residing in Tecopa, a tiny town in the Mojave Desert wilderness, near Death Valley. Living apart from her young daughter much of the time, she emerges from the pandemic-induced loneliness to rekindle a passionate romance with an old flame, Miles.

When their torturous on-again-off-again cycle hits ‘off-again’ Rose resolves to have a second baby without Miles. Enlisting her comrades from an encampment protesting Yellow Pine, a for-profit industrial solar array on formerly public land, Rose’s unorthodox approach to conception becomes a search for community, rest, recovery, and communion with the divine in the face of mass extinction.

Yellow Pine is a meditation on disillusionment and re-enchantment, about sacrifice and chronic grief, the refuge of love, and defending the sacred.

Publisher Review

Yellow Pine is pure Claire Vaye Watkins. Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true. A romp of troubled tender outsider angst, it’s also a fresh classic of desert writing, a lament and a hymn to the great Mohave, bombed, fenced, airbnb’ed and solarized to near ruin and to its mysterious ancient and innocent heart, the desert tortoise. — Joy Williams, author of Concerning the Future of Souls and The Visiting Privilege Yellow Pine is a wild desert howl of celebration and elegy. A true prose-musician, Watkins here conducts a kind of cosmic symphony. It’s a tongue-in-cheek (and tongue-in-many-other-places) midlife epic and also an earnest cry of love for our burning, living world * Karen Russell * Readers will be swept away by this tribute to the power and majesty of nature * Publisher’s Weekly (starred review) * Claire Vaye Watkins has a gift for depicting the American desert and the people who find themselves there * Lit Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2026) * The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx * Vogue * An exhilarating novel . . . I learnt so much about solar energy and tortoises and what it might feel like to eat Fritos in the desert while stargazing * Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and A Thief * Watkins’ keen and righteous novel wrestles with myriad paradoxes, spirituality, and how ecocide does “deep,
grievous injury to the collective soul.” * Booklist * Watkins’s novel grapples with existential questions of individualism and community through the story of Rose, a single mother and environmental activist whose encounter with an old flame leads to life changes. * New York Times (The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026) * Watkins is known for taking risks, and she never repeats herself – I’m betting that her latest book will showcase her genius at storytelling and her love for the rugged landscape of the West. * NPR * Nobody writes about the Mojave like Claire Vaye Watkins . . . A wild, lush, lyrical, torrent of novel-both ode and elegy-that left me reeling * LitHub * Yellow Pine is another hymn to [Vaye Watkins’] Mojave home . . . less of a novel than a novel-length riff . . . in passages of gobsmacking beauty juxtaposed with gobsmacking destruction, in bizarro humor, desert-dry wit and a blistering, more-is-more style of lefty critique. In the Mojave’s very precarity, she shows, lies not just its majesty, but its power to endure. * New York Times * Watkins’s prose can be musical and keenly attentive, and she excels at conveying starry-eyed love * Guardian *