Gates of Grief. Book Four: The Last Country

“The Last Country” is the fourth book of Alexander Afanasyev’s cycle “The Gates of Sorrow,” a large alternate-history saga set in a reality where the 20th century took a different — harsher and more conflict-driven — path. It is 1949, and the Arabian Peninsula becomes a battleground of an unspoken, but extremely brutal confrontation between powers. Here British special services, Russian strategic interests, tribal nobility, religious forces, oil, and railway projects clash and collide — so tightly intertwined that every step requires payment, most often in blood.

Against the backdrop of the collapse of old structures and the pressure of the industrial age, the prince Kasim al-Habeyli comes to the fore — a man of the transition period. He has to speak at once in the language of customs with the highlanders, in the language of coercion with empires, and in the language of the inevitable with history itself.

This is a story not so much about battles as about decisions and compromises: what to choose — the past or the future, loyalty to faith or cold calculation, independence or guardianship by superpowers. Afanasyev shows harshly and in detail how imperial mechanisms work, what the elites live by, how colonial logic functions, and what price the peoples pay who find themselves caught between the interests of the great players.

“The Last Country” is a sharp, intellectual, and controversial novel at the intersection of political thriller, military prose, and reflections on the fates of states and people. It naturally continues “The Gates of Sorrow,” expanding the space of the cycle and deepening its central question: is a just order possible where everyone is ruled by force, fear, and profit.