For fans of Maria Semple and Gail Honeyman, a deliciously witty escapist novel that follows a young woman’s cliff-hanging journey to reinvent herself in the wilds of Baja, Mexico—though she’s unaware that someone else is pulling the strings.

A fiery bus crash, assault, abduction and rebirth into a secret cult—that’s just the beginning. Then the pace picks up.

A fun, fresh take on the sad/bad girl genre that is at once hilarious and deeply moving, Olive Grove, Who Are You? follows thirty-year-old Olive’s rash attempt to escape a bad marriage and dead-end job in California’s Bay Area by running away to Baja, Mexico. Refusing to face the source of her misery—guilt over her role in a long-ago family tragedy—she changes the scenery, changes her name, falls for a shadowy cowboy, and discovers her mission in life several times over . . . while continuing to make the same bad choices, with increasingly nightmarish consequences.

If this sounds like the plot of a larger-than-life thriller, that’s because it is. Rose, like her protagonist, Olive, is trying (and mostly failing) to find herself in Mexico—all the while drafting a cliff-hanging novel called Olive Grove, Who Are You? But until she figures out who she is, she won’t be able to envision an ending for Olive, happy or otherwise. Their mutual destiny: Run for the border, hang over a cliff, repeat.