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Death Valley

A Novel

by Melissa Broder

Narrator Melissa Broder

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Length 5 hours 9 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Lately, I seem to be drawn to books that feature 40-year-old main characters, which I simultaneously both love and hate. Love that I can relate to the struggles, sorrows, and transformations that pull the story together. Hate that the process of dying and the finality of death is a central focus. Even though this is a story based on different kinds of grief, it finds the balance of how oddly funny life can be. Broder really put it best: 'Sometimes we get lost'. (Sidenote: My Dads love language is acts of service.) ”
— Jenny • E. Shaver, bookseller

Bookseller recommendation

“Funny and poignant, Melissa Broder’s new novel Death Valley is smart, original work. Her novel is set in the California high desert - and a very amusing Best Western - where we follow one woman’s solo trip in search of inner peace and respite. Lovely, thoughtful, and very witty. ”
— Peggy • Quail Ridge Books

Bookseller recommendation

“Unable to deal with the double grief of a father in the ICU and a husband with a debilitating, worsening illness, our narrator flees LA to hide out in a Best Western in an unnamed desert town. On a nearby hiking trail she comes upon a giant Saguaro cactus (a species which should not exist in the California desert) with a seam running along its side. Probing the edge, she passes through a portal to surreal realm where child versions of her husband and father play. Exploring grief, human fragility and the complex nature of close relationships Death Valley is an edgy delight! ”
— Samantha • A Great Good Place for Books

Bookseller recommendation

“A hike becomes a metaphysical journey straight into the center of grief, featuring literature’s most memorable cactus. Broder delivers us directly to the site of the wound and somehow makes us want to linger. Beautiful, exciting, and profound.”
— Kristen Iskandrian • Thank You Books

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

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).

Fiction Humor Fiction - Literary

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. She has written for The New York Times, Elle, and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder.