Death Valley

Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times (incandescent...hilarious...a triumph), Oprah Daily (surreal, absurd, lucid, and wise), Vanity Fair (Broder [is] a genius and a sorceress), and more! From the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief and a magical tale of survival (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Melissa Broder's astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow--for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike. Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant. Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is a journey unlike any you've read before (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black).