**Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize**
Susan Perly astonishes in this tale of dark humour and lyrical beauty; an ever-intensifying love triangle, road novel and revenge plot that zooms to a mind-bending finale.
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.
Advance Praise for Death Valley
"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 and I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel
Autorentext
Susan Perly has worked as a journalist, war correspondent and radio producer for the CBC. In the early '80s her Letters from Latin America for Peter Gzowski's Morningside reported from locales such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Chiapas. During the Iran-Iraq war she broadcast Letters from Baghdad, and she produced many documentaries for the weekly program Sunday Morning. Perly is the author of the jazz novel Love Street, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Klappentext
Legendary war photographer Vivienne Pink has five days to photograph servicemen about to deploy for active combat. Racing to meet her deadline, she heads to Las Vegas, where she'll capture images of men who may die the next day - and where she'll confront an abuser from her past to force a reckoning. Accompanied by her husband, a celebrated novelist, and her best friend, a former CIA spook, Vivienne heads out into the Nevada desert in search of adrenaline, vengeance and the perfect shot. Told in a vivid, hallucinogenic realism, Death Valley is a sexy, fast-paced tale that's part Pynchon, part Tarantino.