It’s remarkable how many stories from World War II still slip under the radar—stories about human resilience and resolve that deserve to be told. The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan feels like one of those stories. I’ve always been drawn to WWII narratives, particularly those set on the European front, but many focus primarily on the Holocaust and people fleeing Nazi persecution. While this novel does reference those atrocities, it tells a story I had never encountered before: a family attempting to find salvation with the Allied forces while fleeing Stalin’s army through Nazi-occupied Europe.
I really had to sit with this book after I finished it before I knew what I wanted to say—or even what I thought about it. As many readers know, Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks (and sometimes even neglects apostrophes), which can make following dialogue a challenge. At times, I found myself expending more energy just reading the text than fully understanding what was happening on the page.
Night Shift was Stephen King’s first published collection of short stories. As someone who only relatively recently became a King fan, I was especially curious to explore his short fiction — often cited as where he truly shines. The collection contains twenty stories in total: sixteen previously published in magazines and four original to this volume.
