“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.
