**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* ).