The Valley
A Novel
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4.4 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
*Named one of Wall Street Journal's Best Books of 2015
*Selected as a Military Times's Best Book of the Year
“You’re going up the Valley.”
Black didn’t know its name, but he knew it lay deeper and higher than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.
When Black, a deskbound admin officer, is sent up the Valley to investigate a warning shot fired by a near-forgotten platoon, he can only see it as the final bureaucratic insult in a short and unhappy Army career. What he doesn’t know is that his investigation puts at risk the centuries-old arrangements that keep this violent land in fragile balance, and will launch a shattering personal odyssey of obsession and discovery as Black reckons with the platoon’s dark secrets, accumulated over endless hours fighting and dying in defense of an indefensible piece of land.
The Valley is a riveting tour de force that changes our understanding of the men who fight our wars and announces John Renehan as one of the great American storytellers of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A junior officer referred to as Lieutenant Black, the hero of Renehan's uneven first novel, looks into suspicious goings-on at a remote American military outpost high in the mountains of Afghanistan. Initially, Black uncovers the harmless shooting of a goat, but otherwise makes little progress in his investigation. Yet with each passing day, the awkward silences and unfinished sentences of those he's interviewing convince Black that something far more worrisome than the shooting of native livestock is at stake. Renehan draws on his experiences as a former field artillery officer in Iraq to provide clear insight into the minds of soldiers operating under extreme pressure. After a captivating first half of fresh prose and a driving narrative, however, the story loses its way and turns predictable and introspective. The rot that has been infesting the outpost fails to surprise, and Black's interior thought process is less interesting than the actions he has been ordered to carry out.
