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Drowning in grief

A tastefully minimal road-trip novel
by
April 2025, no. 474

Elegy, Southwest: A novel by Madeleine Watts

Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 276 pp

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Drowning in grief

A tastefully minimal road-trip novel
by
April 2025, no. 474

The themes in Elegy, Southwest are big, nothing less than life and death. Madeleine Watts sets them against a backdrop of monumental scale: the endless desert vistas of the American south-west, the overwhelming monolith of the Hoover Dam, the massive grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The narrative Watts has crafted to explore these big themes rejects anything epic and instead goes small-scale, bringing an almost microscopic lens to the emotional world of a marriage coming apart.

Elegy, Southwest: A novel

Elegy, Southwest: A novel

by Madeleine Watts

Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 276 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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