Eloise and Lewis set out from Las Vegas on a two-week drive through the American Southwest: Hoover Dam, the Colorado River, desert art sites, tourist towns, failing infrastructure and landscapes already beginning to look posthumous.

Lewis is grieving his mother; Eloise is researching water scarcity and considering the possibility that she is pregnant. Their marriage moves through the landscape —heat, drought, disappearance—amidst the suspicion that damage has begun long before anyone agrees to bring it up. 

Watts writes the journey retrospectively, with Eloise addressing an absent “you.” That second-person structure makes the novel feel like an ongoing act of reconstruction: an attempt to locate the moment when grief altered into estrangement, when environmental crisis stopped being background and entered the intimate scale of the body. Research, memory and observation accumulate around the central absence, but never quite contain it.

This is climate fiction, but the world has not ended; it is simply becoming harder to inhabit. While ordinary life continues with date shakes, Instagram posts, motel rooms and badly managed sorrow. Watts is interested in the strange overlap between private loss and ecological loss—not as an easy metaphor, but as two forms of disappearance that resist proportion. 

Ultimo Press, 2025. First Australian edition, first printing. Paperback. Signed by Madeleine Watts on the title page. Very good condition with light shelf and handling wear.