
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
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...




















Editorial Review
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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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