The Night Shift

NOTHING'S EVER FREE. BUT IT'S NEVER FAR OFF. Valumart Extra on Brindley Road hasn't closed since it opened at midnight on New Year's Day 1987. Kerry Mottram has run the night shift for six years, and she thought she'd seen everything: drunks, spillages, and a man who tried to pay with a cheque from a bank that closed in 1996. Then the shelves start filling themselves at 3:07 a.m. Stock nobody ordered appears with no delivery note. Gravy granules best before 1988. Silver tins with no labels that are warm to the touch. A tall figure in an old brown store coat walks the aisles with a pricing gun, and the yellow-sticker bargains get cheaper and stranger every night. The regulars who buy them get thinner. Then greyer. Then one night they don't come in at all, and a new packet of sausages turns up in the chiller with a familiar name on the label. Now Kerry's mum, a devoted yellow-sticker hunter, has started shopping after three. With a student podcaster, a deadpan Polish security guard and a gentle old shelf-stacker who hasn't aged a day since 1987, Kerry has until Christmas Eve to work out who the Night Manager is, what he wants, and how you shut a shop that has never closed. Because at Valumart, shrinkage is everybody's responsibility. And the stock must balance. A darkly funny British horror-comedy about bargains, grief and the things we'd pay anything to taste again.