Death Valley

By: Melissa Broder

Narrated by: Melissa Broder

Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

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.

©2023 Melissa Broder (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

I’ve never read a novel that portrays grief quite like Death Valley. Somehow, Melissa Broder captures both the punishing ordinariness of loss while also showing us how extraordinary it is to have been here at all – and to love each other besides. There is deep wisdom in these pages, and I know I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time (Mary Beth Keane, author of ASK AGAIN, YES)

A journey unlike any you've read before. Death Valley by Melissa Broder 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)

Vulnerable, witty, trippy and conceptually dazzling all at once (Kimberly King Parsons, author of BLACK LIGHT)

I really didn’t like it

Nothing happens in the book. Literally nothing. Its a woman narrating random thoughts about her sick father and sick husband.