A grief novel disguised as a desert spiral, which is probably the correct way to do a grief novel if you don’t want it to behave itself.

A woman travels to the California desert while her father is critically ill and her husband is chronically unwell, and the landscape starts taking on the force of hallucination, comic breakdown, spiritual test, and emotional weather system. There are rocks, heat, hotel rooms, lizards, panic, avoidance, absurdity, and the very human impulse to narrate your own collapse as though that might keep it slightly organised.

Broder is funny, bleak and slippery in the way she handles pain: never quite solemn, never simply ironic. The voice is anxious, perceptive, self-mocking, hungry for meaning and suspicious of meaning at the same time. It’s good for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Miranda July, Sheila Heti, Rachel Yoder, Patricia Lockwood, Jenny Offill, and contemporary fiction where the narrator is both having a breakdown and making quite good observations about it.

Bloomsbury Circus paperback edition, first published in Great Britain in 2023. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and handling. Internally clean.