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 absurdist 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...

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