Riverhead
October 2015
On Sale: September 29, 2015
352 pages ISBN: 1594634238 EAN: 9781594634239 Kindle: B00SI02D8Q Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection,
Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short
fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a
once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that
harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her
debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly
imagined near future:
Unrelenting drought has
transfigured Southern California into a surreal,
phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren,
underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely
depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes
and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders
to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated
to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two
young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of
Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the
“forever war” turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned
mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and
whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
The
couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and
for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths
with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future
begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger:
sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the
brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a
visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who
whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a
mysterious sea of dunes.
Immensely moving,
profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original,
Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others
and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most
cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a
precarious future that may be our own.
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