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