Free

"Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past." - Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

"I haven’t in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in modern day Albania vivid and immediate: no mean accomplishment." - Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

"Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people’s lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story." - Ivan Krastev, author of The Light that Failed

"A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope." - Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline

"Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance." - Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism

"Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free." - Martin Hägglund, author of This Life

"Free is a new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years, from Marxism to socialism to the enforced austerity and “structural reforms” that shaped many of the world’s formerly communist countries after the upheaval of 1989.... Though nonfiction, it unfolds with revelation after revelation—both familial and national—as if written by a master novelist, right through cruel tragedies to an inevitable redemption. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. Truths become lies, lies truths. Albania’s recent history opens up to the reader like a door to an examination room where we can inspect and question the political truths we’ve accepted in our own lifetime, and their validity...You never forget how lucky you are to be reading Free, and how much you are learning about our world. A literary triumph." - Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, and other books

"This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come." - David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends

"Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvelous book." - Noel Malcolm, author of Agents of Empire

" A probing personal history, poignant and moving. A young life unfolding amidst great historical change – ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life." - Tara Westover, author of Educated