The Red Album
The Album He Couldn't Burn: the true story behind The Red Album.
In December 1995, a young British engineer forced open an old iron safe in the wrecked office of a sawmill, on the western edge of a Bosnian town the Dayton accords had just handed back. Most of what he found, he was ordered to destroy. One thing he couldn't: a red leather album of photographs from a 1971 congress in Sarajevo — a whole country at the height of its confidence, twenty years of hope bound in crimson and gold. He carried it home to England. For the best part of thirty years, he never spoke of the place again.
That soldier was Nottingham author Lee Marshman Thomas. The album is real. And it sat in a drawer for three decades before it became The Red Album — his first literary novel, and by his own reckoning the most significant thing he has written.
The book imagines its way back into the world that album came from. In it, the soldier is Conrad King, who came home carrying more than the album — a silence, and a war he never set down. It's what that silence did to him across thirty years, the weight of it, that finally sends his son Josh looking for the town his father would only ever call across the valley. Josh is a journalist who has spent his career on other people's histories; now he goes to uncover his father's.
The town has a name: Mrkonjić Grad. What he finds there is a place destroyed twice over, first by the war and then in the handover, with 181 dead in the cemetery at its centre, and the trace of a family the album might once have belonged to.
From there the novel moves across three timelines — present-day Britain and Bosnia, the long bright decades of a self-confident Yugoslavia, and the terrible autumn of 1995 — reconstructing the life of that imagined family, and asking the question at the book's heart: what does it cost to give something back, and can some things be given back at all?
It's historical fiction in the lineage of Birdsong and The Cellist of Sarajevo — grounded, cinematic and quietly devastating. A requiem for a vanished country, a study of memory and inheritance, and the story of one family's past carried across thirty years to be laid down where it began. The town and the events of 1995 are real; the family is imagined.
About the author. Lee Marshman Thomas is a Nottingham author and British Army veteran who served in Bosnia in 1995 with the Royal Engineers, as part of the NATO-led peacekeeping force. Through his independent imprint, Marshman Books, he's built a genre-spanning catalogue — the New Topia science-fiction trilogy, the biological thriller Pestis set in Mapperley, the River Trent survival story Conger — but The Red Album is a departure: his first literary novel, and the one drawn most directly from his own life. When he isn't writing, he's usually on the Trent in a kayak, or somewhere in the city's food and music scene.
The Red Album is available now in paperback and ebook from Amazon and Google Play, and direct from marshmanbooks.com.
Full disclosure: Lee is one of the team behind NottsRocks — but the album, the safe and the thirty years are all true.
The Red Album Book Cover