Elegy, Southwest

Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest. While wildfires rage, the couple trace the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Eloise, an academic, researches the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry, while Lewis grieves his mother and struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never felt quite at home. Together they cruise past gaping canyons, blinking motels and lonely stretches of wilderness, trying to understand this uncanny landscape where Georgia O'Keeffe built her home and avant-garde artists dig mysterious installations in the sand. When Eloise begins to suspect she might be pregnant, she hopes to turn Lewis's attention from the past to the future, but their relationship continues to fracture as they head towards a destination unknown. Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.