Yellow Pine A Novel

By: Claire Vaye Watkins

Published by Penguin Group, 2026-07-21

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.