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.

Susan Perly has worked as a radio producer at 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. She also produced many documentaries for ?Sunday Morning? during that time.

Perly?s short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and in the anthology Hard Times. ?Jesus and the Toucan? won second prize in the CBC Literary Competition in 1988 and was dramatized with Don Francks. It was her story, ?1956: an excerpt? (about Thelonious Monk and Glenn Gould), which led to the use of jazz as both subject and model in her writing. She has performed parts of Love Street with jazz musicians in Toronto.

Susan Perly lives in Toronto with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee.

Susan Perly's profile page

• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize

"We encounter strange half-human, half-animal creatures as the group moves through Death Valley hitting up diners, motels, army-restricted areas, ghost towns, and old film locations in a voyage that goes in and out of focus as the perception of time recedes and flows."

SubTerrain

"The novel becomes a commentary about the state of the world in which atomic bombs and wars have become commonplace. Thus, the absurdity of the world Perly describes is in fact a lament for the absurdity of the world we live in – a world that has played host to cold wars, world wars and too many other tragedies to count."

Winnipeg Review

"The novel defies genre, mashing up generous helpings of pulp fiction and spaghetti westerns with an abridged history lesson on America’s nuclear heritage.... Hypnotic in its weirdness, Death Valley laments a world that has played host to the Cold War, the atomic bomb, and wars big and small from Vietnam to Iraq."

Toronto Star

"Susan Perly’s novel Death Valley takes on a devastated landscape that is simultaneously celebrated and erased in North American consciousness. Her principal characters move through scenery that is the setting for glamorous Hollywood versions of the West and also the site of atomic tests past and present."

Canadian Literature