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 The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer. In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, Battleborn , swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future: Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs--Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the “forever war” turned surfer--squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise. The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser--a diviner for water--and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes. Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own....

**Praise for Gold Fame Citrus: 

**"A beautiful debut novel . . Watkins' vision is profoundly terrifying. It's a novel that's effective precisely because it's so realistic — while Watkins' image of the future is undeniably dire, there's nothing about it that sounds implausible. . . She also writes with a keen understanding of human nature, both good and bad. She has a genuine compassion for the Angelenos who have chosen to remain in their dying, desiccated city as well as for the ones who have evacuated. . .The prose in Gold Fame Citrus is stunningly beautiful, even when — especially when — Watkins is describing the badlands that Southern California has become…One might think there are only a few ways to portray a landscape that has become, essentially, nothing, but Watkins writes with a brutal kind of beauty, and even in the book's darkest moments, it's impossible to turn away. It's an urgent, frequently merciless book, as unrelenting as it is brilliant. Watkins forces us to confront things we'd probably rather ignore, but because we're human, we can't.” -Los Angeles Times

"[Gold Fame Citrus] burns with a dizzying, scorching genius.” -Vanity Fair

“Watkin’s narrative is mythic and speculative, its sediment forming and re-forming in lists, treatises, and reports. The writing, with its tough sentimentality, is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s, but Watkins has a style of mordant observation all her own.” -*Harper's

*"A searing debut novel…Watkins is a master of tantalizing details…You can feel the grit in your teeth as this thirsty little family drives across an ocean of sand without a map or a prayer." -*Washington Post

*“With razor-sharp language and an eye for the devastating detail, the author conjures up a harrowing alternative to the former glory of the Golden State . . .her descriptions . . . achieve a kind of spooky poetry . . .Watkins never loses sight of Ray and Luz’s tender humanity, rendering their predicament with an abundance of empathy, insight and wit, all of which is what makes Gold Fame Citrus a winner.” -*San Francisco Chronicle 

*“One of the best depictions of contemporary California you’re likely to find outside of Steinbeck.” -BOMB

“Gold Fame Citrus is a sun-struck apocalyptic road trip of the California dream. . . working at the intersection between history and myth, reality and sheer imagination. And, refreshingly and believably, it’s often very, very funny. . . This is not the nameless desolation of The Road, but a wildly vivid, arid world, radically altered and populated with characters whose multiple narratives propel the story.” -Vogue

“At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.” -*Elle

“Watkins writes in a torrent, her language flooding the psychedelic landscapes of her ruined California. It’s a book that could prove prophetic, and one already terrifyingly expressive of our cultural moment in which the slow-motion disaster of Western drought — a disaster more than a century in the making — has finally become un-ignorably visible… The achievement of [Gold Fame Citrus], as with the best apocalyptic fictions, is to make slow violence visible — to bring before our eyes the consequences of the invisible violence we do, and have done, to our lands and to ourselves." – Los Angeles Review of Books

*"Watkins' vision — not just of a world broken by ecological disaster, but of the sorts of people who would thrive in that world — is mercilessly sharp. She's got a knife eye for details, a vicious talent for cutting to the throbbing vein of animal strangeness that scratches inside all of us." -NPR

“Claire Vaye Watkins’s extraordinary debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus is set in a terrifying plausible future… [and] explores the power of both the natural world and mythmaking. The novel is in fact filled with seekers: people with a thirst not just for water, but also for purpose and faith. In that sense, Gold Fame Citrus is finally a religious story, a particularly American one—giving voice to the pioneer’s faith in self-invention.” -*O, The Oprah Magazine

*“[An] ambitious debut novel… [that] evokes the madness, glory, and opportunism of the desert with stunning lyrical flair.” –*Portland Oregonian

*"Gold Fame Citrus features some of the meatiest sentences I’ve read in recent memory.” -The Frisky
 
“All the strength and utility of “Gold Fame Citrus” come from the unrelentingness of its author’s well-schooled gaze…[T]hat gaze encompasses more than tragedy, more than the chaos of civilization’s gradual collapse. It also shares with us the feverish glow of a world lit only by fugitives’ fires, the hallucinatory shimmer surrounding each individual grain of pulverized stone, each tiny tributary to an overwhelming flood of uncontrollable forces: heat, wind, dreams.” –*Seattle Times 

*“Vivid and disturbing… a welcome addition to emerging ‘cli-fi’ genre . . .  Watkins’ novel will certainly rank among this year’s most acclaimed.” -i09

“Gold Fame Citrus transcends genre. It’s part bestiary, part cautionary tale, part omniscient mosaic—occasionally collect…