Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English
Categories

DEATH VALLEY

Melissa Broder

The most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story.

In Melissa Broder's astounding 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, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike.

Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman 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.

This is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley.

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, 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.
Available products
Book

Published 2023-10-01 by Scribner

Comments

"A journey unlike any you've read before. Death Valley is a beautifully wild leap into the mysterious desert that is grief." —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and Friday Black "I've never read a novel that portrays grief quite like Death Valley. Melissa Broder captures both the punishing ordinariness of loss while also showing us how extraordinary it is to have been here at all. There is deep wisdom in these pages." —Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes and The Half Moon