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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