Death Valley

Front Cover
Buckrider Books, 2016 - Fiction - 312 pages

Love is complicated. It's 2006 and Vivienne Pink, a photojournalist with an eye for war, is flying to Las Vegas to capture images of servicemen deploying for combat in Iraq. Together with her novelist husband and their housemate, an intelligence operative, Vivienne plans a side trip to Death Valley to confront an old enemy, but her scheme is soon complicated by a handsome young soldier on his way to war and a retired counterterrorism agent wearing a bird suit. Together they begin an atomic road trip through empty canyons, old film locations and the Nevada desert's nuclear test site, where reality shifts like sand beneath their feet. This is Death Valley, and the fallout is hilarious and harrowing.

"Reading Death Valley is like going on a road trip into the hallucinatory landscape of the CIA's repressed memories. Hypnotic and startling, with a cast of troubled artists and agents, this sensual novel is a lush fever dream of power, politics, betrayal and revenge. With scenes so vivid and unflinching and downright bizarre, this novel gets under your skin like the desert sand at its core."?Jennifer LoveGrove, author of Watch How We Walk

"Equal parts Twin Peaks and Alice in Wonderland, Susan Perly's Death Valley is a Film-Noir-Spy-Western'hallucinogenic, thought-provoking and bizarre enough to satisfy anyone who thinks about art, nuclear fallout, classic films, conspiracies or love. It's wild enough to be fiction, and real enough to blow your mind."?Michelle Berry, author of Interference

About the author (2016)

Susan Perly is the author of Death Valley, longlisted in 2016 for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Love Street, told in the voice of late-night DJ Miss Mercy. Her memoir on art and marriage, "Picasso's Pigeons," set in Barcelona, appeared in Zone 3 in 2013. A former journalist and radio producer, she broadcast eyewitness reports from Guatemala, El Salvador and Argentina during the Dirty War, and from Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. Susan Perly lives in her hometown Toronto with her husband, poet Dennis Lee.

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