Yellow Pine

by Claire Vaye Watkins

In the latest novel from “our most significant rising writer of the American West” (Vulture), an unfettered heroine searches for a new way to love, and live, in a deeply uncertain world

The first time Rose fell for Miles, she was a college kid, all too eager to be swept into his sexy orbit; little wonder the relationship crashed and burned. When Miles comes back into her life two decades later, he finds a different Rose. Not only has she moved back to her beloved desert, on a homestead she’s dubbed Nothingness Flats, but she’s chosen to live “on the other side of the portal,” with an intentionality that’s brought her hard-won peace and freedom. She’s navigating single parenthood, and she’s found a community out at Yellow Pine, where a group of spirited misfits have mounted a stand against the corporatization of solar power. Is it worth jeopardizing all this for another chance with Miles? And yet the universe seems to be beckoning her, not only back to him but possibly toward another child. What shape might her future take, on this side of the portal?

As furious, funny, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a precarious age.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication July 21, 2026

About the author

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, California and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, the New York Times and elsewhere. Claire has received fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf.

Her collection of short stories, Battleborn (Riverhead Books), won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Battleborn was named a best book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, Flavorwire, and NPR.org. In 2012, Claire was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.”

Currently a visiting assistant professor at Princeton University, Claire is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

Reviews

[CJ Alberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you god for making me an Arizonan 🤸🤸🤸🤸🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I want to start by saying that I adore Claire Vaye Watkins, and Yellow Pine was one of my most anticipated reads of 2026.

I love the way Watkins wrangles language; she lassos words from the desert lexicon and the language of the heart and marries them in a completely unique and idiosyncratic way. Yellow Pine shines when Vaye Watkins writes about the California/Nevada desert setting and the intense codependency and love of her main character, Rose.

Yellow Pine is a novel in which Rose, a single mother who has returned to the desert of her youth, grapples with both the reemergence of a lover from her past and the destruction of nature and the nature of destruction and rebirth. She is surrounded by a motley cast of characters, and a large chunk of the book is told in quippy, loose cannon dialogue. I realized I was skipping over whole swaths of these frantic rants as I found them to be both uninteresting and mildly esoteric.

I finished Yellow Pine feeling that the balance in the novel was way out of whack, and maybe that's the point... That the balance between love and friendship set in stark contrast against the destruction of the natural world and an uncertain future is bound to be uneven and forever unsettled. Which I get on a cerebral level, but was left feeling that the novel, as it careens between messy character development and a discourse of agitated chaos, just didn't land emotionally.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dammmnnn this book hit me like a ton of bricks. I have been a fan of all of Claire Vaye Watkins' books, but she is at her best with her latest YELLOW PINE. What starts out as a seemingly straightforward book about the climate apocalypse and people living off the grid in CA/NV, it slowly turns into a treatise on being a parent in these times and what it means to spark the light of life in a world that is continuously trying to extinguish it.

Rose is a single mother and activist, living in a homestead in the Mojave Desert and desperately missing her daughter June who lives on the east coast, only visiting during school breaks. While at her loneliest, she reconnects with Miles after two decades apart, her college boyfriend who she has never stopped thinking about. He is a free spirit, hard to pin down but still means the world to Rose, who wants to have him to herself.

This book is a love story, a warning, and a prayer to the earth and to the children who will soon inherit it. Plus, it takes place and gives an incredible history of the town of Truckee and the surrounding Lake Tahoe area, a place I have spent a lot of time in and love dearly. I will hold this book close to my heart for a long, long time.