DESCRIPTION

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men’s Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews.

Gold Fame Citrus is the much-anticipated first novel by Claire Vaye Watkins, a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer. This novel, set in a vividly imagined near future, is a haunting love story against the backdrop of an unrelenting drought that has transformed Southern California into a surreal, desolate landscape.

In this bleak future, the Central Valley is barren, underground aquifers have dried up, and the Sierra snowpack is completely depleted. The majority of “Mojavs”—residents of the Mojave Desert—are forced into internment camps, their dreams of escaping to lusher lands crushed by armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy.

In the midst of this desolation, two young survivors, Luz and Ray, take refuge in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon. Luz, once the poster child for the Bureau of Conservation, and Ray, a war veteran turned surfer, find solace in their fragile love, subsisting on rationed cola and whatever they can scavenge. Their lives take a drastic turn when they encounter a mysterious child, sparking a desire for a better future.

As they journey eastward, facing sinkholes, patrolling authorities, and the brutal sun, they are pursued by rumors of a visionary dowser—a water diviner—who leads a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes. Gold Fame Citrus is a deeply moving, profoundly unsettling, and breathtakingly original exploration of the myths we believe about others and the stories we tell about ourselves. This novel delves into the double-edged nature of our most cherished relationships and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be closer than we think.