Yellow Pine: 'Watkins writes like an avenging angel' Jenny Offill

Claire Vaye Watkins

'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.