On 19 September 2023, war broke out once again in Nagorno-Karabakh, a tiny breakaway state nestled in the mountains at the very edge of Europe.

For three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, this battle-scarred geopolitical hotspot had been fought over in a bloody standoff that left tens of thousands dead and as many as a million people homeless. This time, though, things were different. Within 24 hours, Armenian forces surrendered in the face of an overwhelming Azerbaijani offensive, as Russian peacekeepers abandoned their positions—and the entire local population packed their bags to flee. Through the eyes of ordinary Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Gabriel Gavin chronicles how Nagorno-Karabakh went from an ancient home shared by both peoples to a land of empty houses and untended graves, as the world looked on.

Ashes of Our Fathers offers unprecedented insight not only into a simmering ethnic conflict inside the Kremlin’s self-declared sphere of influence, but into the lives, loyalties and national ideas of the people caught up in the chaos; and into the decisions, from Yerevan and Baku to Moscow and Washington to Tel Aviv and Tehran, that led directly to one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the 2020s.