Claire Vaye Watkins – författare

Haunting and beautifully written first novel by the award-winning author of Battleborn, set among a cult of survivors in a dystopian American desert'A Mad Max world painted with a finer brush' Elle'An unforgettable journey into a hauntingly imagined near-future' Ruth Ozeki'Set in a drought-ravaged Southern California trolled by scavengers, Gold Fame Citrus burns with a dizzying, scorching genius' Vanity FairDesert sands have laid waste to the south-west of America. Las Vegas is buried. California - and anyone still there - is stranded. Any way out is severely restricted. But Luz and Ray are not leaving. They survive on water rations, black market fruit and each other's need. Luz needs Ray, and Ray must be needed. But then they cross paths with a mysterious child, who needs them more than anything - and the thirst for a better life begins.Claire Vaye Watkins's much-anticipated and lauded first novel delivers on her promise as one of America's best new writers.

From "the most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx" (Vogue), the furious, hilarious, soul-rending story of one woman's reckoning with marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.

A 2022 LA Times Book Prize FinalistA darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse-one woman's furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can't go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward? Alone in the wilderness, at last she begins to make herself at home in the world.Bold, tender, and often hilarious, I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness reaffirms Watkins as one of the single writers of our time.

'The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx' Vogue'Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true' Joy WilliamsA desert scorched feminist eco-novel, Yellow Pine is about a self-determined pioneer woman romping into her forties and recovering from her rugged individualism.Rose is a divorced, disillusioned Sierra Club staffer residing in Tecopa, a tiny town in the Mojave Desert wilderness, near Death Valley. Living apart from her young daughter much of the time, she emerges from the pandemic-induced loneliness to rekindle a passionate romance with an old flame, Miles.When their torturous on-again-off-again cycle hits 'off-again' Rose resolves to have a second baby without Miles. Enlisting her comrades from an encampment protesting Yellow Pine, a for-profit industrial solar array on formerly public land, Rose's unorthodox approach to conception becomes a search for community, rest, recovery, and communion with the divine in the face of mass extinction.Yellow Pine is a meditation on disillusionment and re-enchantment, about sacrifice and chronic grief, the refuge of love, and defending the sacred.

'The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx' Vogue'Inimitable, irrepressible, wild and true' Joy WilliamsA desert scorched feminist eco-novel, Yellow Pine is about a self-determined pioneer woman romping into her forties and recovering from her rugged individualism.Rose is a divorced, disillusioned Sierra Club staffer residing in Tecopa, a tiny town in the Mojave Desert wilderness, near Death Valley. Living apart from her young daughter much of the time, she emerges from the pandemic-induced loneliness to rekindle a passionate romance with an old flame, Miles.When their torturous on-again-off-again cycle hits 'off-again' Rose resolves to have a second baby without Miles. Enlisting her comrades from an encampment protesting Yellow Pine, a for-profit industrial solar array on formerly public land, Rose's unorthodox approach to conception becomes a search for community, rest, recovery, and communion with the divine in the face of mass extinction.Yellow Pine is a meditation on disillusionment and re-enchantment, about sacrifice and chronic grief, the refuge of love, and defending the sacred.

The stories in Battleborn all unfold in Watkins's home state of Nevada, from down south in Nye County and Las Vegas, to Reno, Lake Tahoe, and the Blackrock Desert, the site of Burning Man. We are introduced to a very specific small town America, to those homes and lives off the highway - the ones travellers and writers usually drive past on their way to somewhere else.While the locations are ordinary, the characters and Watkins' telling of their lives are anything but. There is the man who finds a cache of letters, pills and a photograph abandoned by the side of the road and as he writes to the man he imagines left them behind, reveals moving truths about himself ('The Last Thing We Need'); the man in late middle age who finds a troubled, pregnant teen dying in the desert and, through her, begins to dream of regaining the family he lost ('Man-O-War'); the brothers caught in the early days of the gold rush ('The Diggings'); and the sisters unable to comfort each other following their mother's suicide ('Graceland'). And there is the first story ('Ghosts, Cowboys'), a semi-autobiographical account of a troubled - and famous - family history.