'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.

"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

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Watkins' keen and righteous novel wrestles with myriad paradoxes, spirituality, and how ecocide does "deep,
grievous injury to the collective soul."

"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