Yellow Pine

A Novel

By: Claire Vaye Watkins

In the latest novel from “our most significant rising writer of the American West” (Vulture), a woman searches for a way to reclaim the miracle of life in a world seemingly hellbent on doom

In her homestead deep in the Mojave, Rose has found a way to live “on the other side of the portal,” with an intentionality that’s brought her hard-won peace and freedom. She’s navigating single parenthood, and she’s found a community out at Yellow Pine, where a group of spirited misfits have mounted a stand against the “green energy gold rush” Rose is certain will destroy her beloved desert. When she accepts an overture from Miles, an old flame, their passion proves as intense – and unsteady – as ever. But even as their rekindled romance flickers, it fuels a deeper, more consuming drive in Rose: to birth not only another child but a fuller, more intact way of being in the face of rapacious consumerism, industrialization, and misanthropy. Enlisting her on-again-off-again lover, her fellow activists, and her oddball neighbors, she embarks upon an unorthodox scheme to recover from her rugged individualism, embrace love in all its pain and grace, and come home to the divine.

As furious, bawdy, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a ravaged time.

Critic reviews

Praise for Yellow Pine:

“Lyrical and scathing … Readers will be swept away by this tribute to the power and majesty of nature.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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, author of National Book Award finalist, The Antidote

“Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true. A romp of troubled tender outsider angst, it’s also a fresh classic of desert writing, a lament and hymn to the great Mojave, bombed, fenced, airbnb.ed and solarized to near ruin, and to its mysterious ancient and innocent heart, the desert tortoise.”—Joy Williams, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Quick and the Dead