War in Ukraine, a global hunger crisis, the West's cost of living crisis - the eruptions of 2022 were all too predictable. In Price Wars, Rupert Russell lays out just how these crises are connected and how many such events plunged the 2010s into a decade of turmoil. Entering the eye of the storm - from the trenches of Russian separatist-controlled Donbas to bomb disposal squads in Mosul to cattle raiders in Kenya - Russell discovers a butterfly effect of chaos in the real world being driven by chaos in the commodities markets. The price of food and oil has the power to bankroll foreign invasions, plunge continents into poverty and spark revolutions, civil wars and refugee crises. And these prices, whistle-blowing hedge fund managers and Nobel Prize winners told him, have become irrational. In this thrilling expose of the dark financial forces that rule our world, Russell takes us on adventure into the inner workings of global disorder unlike any other.

Stroud is a compact cultural soup of stories waiting to be told. Rupert's photographs take you under the skin of the people in this unique town, at times part of the picture-perfect Cotswolds it occupies and at times set very apart.

For Rupert Russell, the shock of the Trump-Brexit victories was only the latest in a decade full of them: the unstoppable war in Syria, huge migrant flows into Europe, beheadings in Iraq, children caged at the US border. In Price Wars he sets out on an improbable journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s. Armed with a notebook, flak jacket and pink socks, Russell travels to modern apocalypses across five continents, embedding with separatist soldiers in the trenches of Eastern Ukraine, gangs of street kids battling over garbage in Caracas, the UN bomb disposal squad in Iraq and cattle raiders in Northern Kenya. He traces the origins of these conflicts back to dramatic and mysterious swings in the prices of essential commodities. He meets with commodity speculators who describe the inner workings of these volatile markets, explaining how food prices can spike even in years of abundant harvests, causing bread riots and revolutions. Oil prices can surge on rumours, enriching and emboldening dictators and terrorists alike. These price shocks, and many others across the decade, triggered local disasters that became global catastrophes. It is chaotic prices, Russell learned, fuelled by banks and hedge funds in New York and London, that have toppled regimes and fractured the West. Price Wars is a page-turning chronicle of discovery and a ground-breaking expose of the power of price to devastate the world.