Death Valley: A Novel

**Named a Best Book of the Year 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 absurdist 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 *Chain-Gang All-Stars* ).