
Death Valley
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Melissa Broder
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By:
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Melissa Broder
About this listen
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).
©2023 Melissa Broder (P)2023 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Sheena Patel
- Narrated by: Sheena Patel
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Sheena Patel’s incandescent first novel begins with the unnamed narrator describing her involvement in a seemingly unequal romantic relationship. With a clear and unforgiving eye, she dissects the behavior of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world. I’m a Fan offers a devastating critique of class, social media, patriarchy’s hold on us, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.
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chaotic, cringe inducing
- By Uviinaa on 02-11-24
By: Sheena Patel
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The Guest
- A Novel
- By: Emma Cline
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her.
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We’ve known an Alex
- By Will Cathcart on 06-20-23
By: Emma Cline
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Death in Her Hands
- A Novel
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one. Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate.
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Omg get ON with it
- By Nicole Dreyfus on 06-24-20
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate; she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
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I love it...
- By Claudia Gallegos on 07-12-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Pretend I'm Dead
- By: Jen Beagin
- Narrated by: Candace Thaxton
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Jen Beagin's quirky, moving, "frank and unflinching" (Josh Ferris) debut novel introduces an unforgettable character, Mona - almost 24, emotionally adrift, and cleaning houses to get by. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient she calls Mr. Disgusting, who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. In search of healing, Mona decamps to Taos, New Mexico, for a fresh start, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs, all of whom have one or two things to teach her.
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Are you kidding me??!!
- By Fleming on 07-19-18
By: Jen Beagin
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Chlorine
- A Novel
- By: Jade Song
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho, Imani Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life.
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So much mislisting going on here
- By K. Apgar on 06-30-23
By: Jade Song
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Death Valley In ‘49
- By: William Lewis Manly
- Narrated by: Andre Stojka
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Death in the desert under a relentless sun. This is an eyewitness account of wagon train pioneer families in 1849, who faced the horrifying heat of what is now known as Death Valley, California and survived the ordeal through an act of incredible heroism. It is also a first person account, never before recorded as an audio book, of working the California gold fields, crossing through the Panama jungle and witnessing the horror of slavery in America. It is a unique document of history and adventure. William Lewis Manly lived through these events and wrote a personal account.
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A wonderful story very well told
- By kevin lee on 04-09-18
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Pizza Girl
- A Novel
- By: Jean Kyoung Frazier
- Narrated by: Jeena Yi
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.
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Writing
- By Tobyizme on 07-11-20
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The Water Cure
- A Novel
- By: Sophie Mackintosh
- Narrated by: Hannah Murray, Gemma Whelan, Morfydd Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore.
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Unique, strange, beautiful
- By Brittany Clemens on 01-08-19
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Perfume and Pain
- A Novel
- By: Anna Dorn
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.
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Hilarious!!
- By Marilyn on 05-22-24
By: Anna Dorn
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Lapvona
- A Novel
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.
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uncomfortable
- By Stetson on 07-04-22
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Piglet
- A Novel
- By: Lottie Hazell
- Narrated by: Rebekah Hinds
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.
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Revelation through Food
- By M.A. on 10-07-24
By: Lottie Hazell
Strong voice
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and styles of writing and taking a risk. That is living!
Love the poetic language about humanness, love and death
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I’m happy that I did return to the story. After I turned off my “crabby lady” inner voice and listened to the story, I became intrigued. The unnamed narrator’s babbling has a deep well producing that babble.
She is a 40-something married novelist who feels she is dry of ideas. Her father is in the ICU after a devastating car crash. She is worried about her father dying. Her husband is housebound and disabled. She is stressed. So, she decides to take a short trip to Death Valley for inspiration. She expects a desert-based epiphany.
She checks herself into a Best Western. (Thank you, author Broder, for the quirky characters and abundant hotel humor.) After much self-babble, she determines a long walk in the desert might inspire her. She’s a spiritual seeker after all. She perceives “wandering around in the desert, there’s no need to play hard to get with God”. Of course there will be a fork in the road..
There’s a cactus. There are bunnies. A vicious teen bunny. There are stones, all colors. But it’s in the cactus that Broder’s imagination shines. Broder does a great job with the narrator’s self-rumination which are critical with some therapy self-talk thrown in. Her are observations unique and brilliant.
This is a meditation on loss and grief. It’s clever.
Broder is the perfect narrator!
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Tone of Story Was a Difficult to Figure Out Until Too Late
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The magical realism of the cactus, was it there or just a mirage?
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Min min min
4stars
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Nice, Short Read
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Thoughts of a woman in the desert
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Couldn't tell if she was on an acid trip
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I would only recommend this book to a friend who had an immediate and critical need for paper; to be used for sanitary purposes.
Monumentally Terrible
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