In her homestead deep in the Mojave, Rose has found a way to live 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 “green energy gold rush” Rose is certain will destroy her beloved desert. When she accepts an overture from Miles, an old flame, their passion proves as intense as ever. But even as their rekindled romance flickers, it fuels a deeper, more consuming drive in Rose: to birth not only another child but a fuller, more intact way of being in the face of rapacious consumerism, industrialization and misanthropy. Enlisting her on-again-off-again lover, her fellow activists and her oddball neighbors, she embarks upon an unorthodox scheme to recover from her rugged individualism.

Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can’t go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward?

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’s Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.