
Yellow Pine : 'Watkins writes like an avenging angel' Jenny Offill - Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins
- Pages · 256 pages, N/A
- Publication Date · 21/07/2026
- Genre · Fiction: special features
The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx' Vogue
'Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true' Joy WilliamsA 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.
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