Fiction or not so historical fiction with romantic overtones. All this understood with that epic review of plots that border on the true from the fully biographical or from perfectly recognizable dramatic scenarios. So what Mark Sullivan is not an essentially romantic author.. But it is thanks to these plots that he begins to be known throughout the world. There will be time for his other narrative proposals sprinkled with mysteries to arrive, adventure or suspense.
The point is that it seems as if an author who joins a genre acts as an intruder. When it's just a matter of having something to tell and addressing it from the perspective you most want. But of course, then there are the stereotypes that associate female narrative with costumbrista romanticism or male signatures with war literature.
Well, here is good old Mark Sullivan to undo, once again, preconceived ideas. We just have to delve into his work and wait for the new things he has to come up with that point of surprise for the genre he can play. Because if a writer knows how to narrate, gliding perfectly over any genre, he or she will be welcome.
The best books of Mark Sullivan
Under a scarlet sky
In love and in war everything is allowed. And let's not say if both premises come together... Only such an approach and also taken from a true story could distance Mark T. Sullivan from that usual genre mentioned above, surrounding mystery and suspense. Genres in which he had been moving with enough success to chain a solid career in the United States.
And perhaps Sullivan's literary career would have been exclusively confined to his country had it not been for Hollywood to notice his story about the real life of Pino Lella, a young Italian from 1943 who was forced to participate in World War II and which ended up being a perfect safe-conduct to save the lives of many persecuted Jews on both sides of the borders of Italy.
Casual heroes have that I don't know what any of us can become. And knowing about the good Lella confirms the increasingly remote impression that human beings can show off that supposed humanity that does good.
From a city like Milan where Pino led a life focused on his childhood things, on the borders of a conflict that splashed here and there, the poor man suddenly finds himself brutally stripped of everything by a bomb.
His particular drama leads him to the circles of resistance with which he gets involved to seek life opportunities for entire communities of Jews. Among all those people who move in the shadows of the world in the hope of making it better, there is Anna. And of course, with her emotions on the surface, Pino discovers in her that love in which she can finish focusing on a vital foundation that would otherwise succumb to the horrors of war.
Maybe love can't always do everything. But without a doubt, Pino's love for Anna gave him the necessary strength to overcome his hatred of destruction, in that balance defeated on the side of evil in which there is only faith in God or in love to hope to build a better future.
the last green valley
There is something of well-understood opportunism in Sullivan's work. Because each new story that he presents perfectly fits narrative needs of the first order. Approaching the Ukraine at the end of the Second World War supposes a whole intrahistorical vision of that country shaken in the XXI century by a conflict of dimensions at times similar to the IIWW.
At the end of March 1944, as Soviet troops advance into Ukraine, Emil and Adeline Martel are forced to make an agonizing decision: should they wait for them and risk being sent to Siberia? Or reluctantly follow the dangerous Nazi officers sworn to protect them?
The Martels are one of many families of German descent whose ancestors have worked the land in Ukraine for more than a century. But after living under Stalin's regime of terror, the young couple decides that their best option is to flee in retreat with the Nazis, whom they despise, to escape the Soviets in search of their freedom.
Caught between two warring forces and facing terrible odds in reaching their goal of reaching the West, the story of the Martels is a moving, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful tale that illuminates the extraordinary power of love and dreams and the incredible family's will to survive.
