Wonder Valley

During a typically crowded morning commute on a Los Angeles freeway, a naked man is running between the stalled cars. The sight makes the local news, and it lodges in the minds of a set of people who are each, in their own way, stuck.

There is Ren, just out of juvie, who has come to Los Angeles to find the mother he lost to Skid Row. There is Tony, a bored and unhappy lawyer, moved by the sight of a man running free. There is Blake, a drifter laying low in the desert and doing his best to hold off his own violent instincts.

And out past the city there is a commune, where Patrick — a self-proclaimed healer — holds a powerful and dangerous sway over his disciples, among them his teenage twin sons Owen and James, and a newcomer named Britt who arrives carrying a secret of her own.

Wonder Valley braids these lives together until they collide. It is a Los Angeles novel about drifters, believers, and the people the city lets fall through, moving between the freeways and Skid Row and the high desert. Ivy Pochoda's third novel, published in 2017.