Claire Vaye Watkins
Yellow Pine
Released July 21st, 2026 by Riverhead Books
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot asserts, “In the mountains, there you feel free.” The line evokes wonder and, obviously, a sense of freedom, in strong contrast to the rest of the poem, which explores what Eliot felt was the sterility and spiritual emptiness of existence in his modern era. Yellow Pine, the third novel by Claire Vaye Watkins, relocates this contrasting terrain to the desert, specifically the Mojave Desert, where both of her previous novels were set. In this one, Watkins tackles what it means to live in the Mojave in the modern world, as that spiritual emptiness creeps in inexorably. She also weaves a will-she-won’t-she narrative about a woman deciding whether or not to have another baby, on her own terms. Both themes have come up often in her previous two novels, but in Yellow Pine, she paints her characters in rosier hues, crafting people who know each other’s hearts are in the right place, even when things go wrong.
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Toronto is a graveyard of dreams and a battlefield for the living. Caught between a power-hungry Mayor in City Hall and a ruthless warlord in the West End, Mark and Olivia must navigate a landscape of blind idiot windows and silent subway tunnels to protect their newborn daughter. In a city where the lights have gone out and the rules have vanished, survival is the only law.
Tommy delivers poison by bike in a dying town
Jason donates to a charity that may not exist
Johannes erases people from memory
Dakota’s trial airs live to a voting public
Steve’s wife is pregnant, and no one else is
Jack blacks out after stargazing, and people vanish
Farsi guides strangers through the ruins of Toronto
Lost Ghosts is a collection of seven dark, twisted horror short stories set in a world quietly falling apart.
High school in the 1980s meant cigarette breaks outside the doors, flirting in the parking lot, and endless afternoons at the mall. For Jody, Andy, and Brenda, the mall is their kingdom, until a stolen silk scarf drags them into something darker than teenage rebellion.
What begins as a petty act of shoplifting spirals into a midnight break-in, where the fluorescent glow of the mall gives way to shadows that don’t behave like shadows at all. In the dead corridors of an empty shopping center, something ancient and hungry stirs, something that moves to the rhythm of the music and won’t stop until it’s fed.
Part nostalgic time capsule, part nightmare descent, Under Cover of the Night is a chilling tale of friendship, temptation, and the horrors that slither just beyond the fluorescent lights.
