Death Valley Broder Melissa (2024)

This darkly funny novel about grief becomes a desert survival story. A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking relief from an emptiness that haunts her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape her sorrow over both her father, who is in intensive care, and her husband, whose illness is worsening. Instead of peace, the motel offers her a path, when a receptionist recommends a nearby hike. On the sun-scorched trail, she encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape should not exist in California. Yet it is there, with a gash in its side that beckons like a familiar door. She enters it, and what awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey that is at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.