A new novel by Claire Vaye Watkins is coming later this year.
Riverhead will publish the author’s Yellow Pine in the summer, the press announced in a news release. “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,” the press says.
Watkins made her literary debut in 2012 with the short story collection Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Three years later, she published her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Her most recent book was the 2021 novel I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the novel, “Incandescent writing illuminates one woman’s life in flames.”
Yellow Pine will follow Rose, a single mother and environmental activist living in a homestead in the Mojave Desert who rekindles a romance with an old lover and learns to embrace the power of community.
“Yellow Pine stunningly conjures the magic, terror, and ecologically ravaged landscape of the West, her beloved home turf, with unparalleled mastery—all while wrestling with profound existential questions about love, the natural world, and finding one’s way to personal liberation,” Riverhead says.
Yellow Pine is scheduled for publication on July 21.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
