Yellow Pine by Watkins, Claire Vaye

"Watkins has never written more confidently or staked so much on her unmistakable voice, which winds through environmental catastrophe, goofy comedy, and sexual obsession. ... Think Miranda July with cacti." --Ron Charles

"Exhilarating ... a novel with huge and electric convictions."--Megha Majumdar

"Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true."--Joy Williams

"A wild desert howl of celebration and elegy."--Karen Russell

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Summer by NPR, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, The Millions, and more

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.


Author: Claire Vaye Watkins
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 07/21/2026
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.41h x 5.61w x 1.01d
ISBN: 9798217045020

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/11/2026
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2026
Booklist 06/01/2026

About the Author
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the story collection Battleborn and the novels Gold Fame Citrus and I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. She has received the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California, Irvine.