Death Valley

A Novel

Melissa Broder

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781668024898
• Subtopic: Literature General

Named a Best Book of the Year 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 Chain-Gang All-Stars).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
• Chapter Twenty-Five
• Chapter Twenty-Six
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
• Chapter Thirty
• Chapter Thirty-One
• Chapter Thirty-Two
• Chapter Thirty-Three
• Chapter Thirty-Four
• Chapter Thirty-Five
• Chapter Thirty-Six
• Chapter Thirty-Seven
• Chapter Thirty-Eight
• Chapter Thirty-Nine
• Chapter Forty
• Chapter Forty-One
• Chapter Forty-Two
• Chapter Forty-Three
• Chapter Forty-Four
• Chapter Forty-Five
• Chapter Forty-Six
• Chapter Forty-Seven
• Chapter Forty-Eight
• Chapter Forty-Nine
• Chapter Fifty
• Chapter Fifty-One
• Chapter Fifty-Two
• Chapter Fifty-Three
• Chapter Fifty-Four
• Chapter Fifty-Five
• Chapter Fifty-Six
• Chapter Fifty-Seven
• Chapter Fifty-Eight
• Chapter Fifty-Nine
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright