Into the Valley

“Mesmerizing . . . A subtle and complicated exploration of what it means to be a woman and, more specifically, what it means to be a woman without a man” (Elle).

One day in July 1967, B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for California’s Central Valley. Unmarried and thirty years old, B. doesn’t understand the new youthful counterculture. She likes the dresses and kid gloves of her mother’s generation—but doesn’t fit into that world either.

Beset by an oppressive anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” she finds the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape—meeting along the way an alcoholic professor, a bohemian teenage girl, and a criminal admirer—B.’s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be, in “a beautiful novel filled with poetic language” (New York Journal of Books).