A British soldier brought a stranger's photograph album home from a ruined Bosnian town in 1995.Thirty years later, his son sets out to give it back.

Conrad King came back from Bosnia in 1995 with a red leather album he should have burned with everything else, and a silence he kept for the rest of his life. There was one thing he would never say: the name of the town.

When his son Josh — a journalist who has spent his career on other people's stories and histories — finally goes to find it, the town has a name: Mrkonjić Grad. A place destroyed twice, first by the war and then in the handover, with 181 of the massacred lying in the cemetery at its centre and a story far older than the soldiers who passed through it.

Moving between present-day Britain and Bosnia, the long decades of a self-confident Yugoslavia, and the terrible autumn of 1995, The Red Album reconstructs the life of the family the album might have belonged to — and asks what it costs to return something, and whether some things can be given back at all.

Grounded, cinematic, and quietly devastating, this is literary historical fiction in the lineage of Birdsong and The Cellist of Sarajevo: a requiem for a vanished country, a study of memory and inheritance, and the story of another family's past, carried across thirty years and finally laid down where it began.

Inspired by a true object: in December 1995, serving in Bosnia with the British Army as part of NATO's peacekeeping force, the author found the red album in a safe in a ruined sawmill in Mrkonjić Grad, and kept it for thirty years. The town and the events of 1995 are real; the family at the novel's heart is imagined.