Yellow Pine

'Watkins writes like an avenging angel' Jenny Offill

De: Claire Vaye Watkins

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.©2026 Claire Vaye Watkins (P)2026 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Reseñas de la Crítica

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