APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
This audiobook combines a memoir that translates perfectly to the spoken-word format with a flawless, memorable narration by Rachel Bavidge. Bavidge’s tone and delivery capture every emotion during author Lea Ypi’s journey from repression to freedom. At its core, this is a coming-of-age story of a girl growing up in Communist Albania in a time of dramatic political upheaval. Ypi, who also provides some narration, then describes life in a free country with economic and political challenges all around. Critical to the audiobook’s success is Bavidge’s ability to deliver Ypi’s engaging dialogue flawlessly. Listeners will relish every moment. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 10/11/2021
A child’s sense of safety, security, and national pride is upended as family histories surface and a political system splinters in this beautiful debut from Guardian contributor Ypi. The author, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Albania, recounts her coming-of-age in 1990 as the country (the last with Stalinist-type rulers in Europe) began to shed its Communist identity. She reflects on her puzzlement as a young girl when protesters demanding freedom and democracy took hold of her city that December. “We had plenty of freedom,” she writes. “I felt so free... my freedom as a burden.” That mindset, nurtured by her teachers at school, directly opposed the beliefs of her family, intellectuals and property owners whose own ideas of liberty led to their punishment in what the Party referred to as “universities,” where “different subjects of study corresponded to different official charges.” When the government crumbled, her parents felt it safe enough to finally reveal to her “that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century.” Out of this comes an electric narrative of personal and political reckoning, suffused with sharp cultural critique, that underscores history’s contentious relationship with independence and truth. This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece. (Jan.)
Ivan Krastev
"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."
Tara Westover
"A young life unfolding amid great historical change: ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life."
David Runciman
"This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated, but it is so much more than that."
Paul Mason
"Written by one of Europe’s foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance."
Martin Hägglund
"Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time.… This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free."
Olivia Sudjic
"Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece, and the best book I’ve read so far this year."
Azar Nafisi
"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."
Amy Wilentz
"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… revelation after revelation—both familial and national—as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph."
Jacobin - Kristen Ghodsee
"Essential reading. Lea Ypi's gorgeously written text - part memoir, part bildungsroman - tells a very personal story of socialism and postsocialism. Poignant and timely."
Philippe Sands
"A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood, and hope."
Washington Post Best Books of 2022
"Ypi’s beguiling memoir of innocence and experience in Albania’s communist era and its aftermath is told through intimate stories of a taken-for-granted life devolving into uncertainty. It serves as a profound primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust."
Spectator - Ruth Scurr
"Lea Ypi's Free is the first book since Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend that I have pressed on family, friends and colleagues, insisting they read it. . . a truly riveting memoir and a profound meditation on what it means to be free."
New Statesman - Lyndsey Stonebridge
"Ypi's deliciously smart memoir of her Albanian girlhood at the end of the Cold War is a brilliant disquisition on the meanings of freedom - its lures, false hopes, disappointments and possibilities - in our time."
New York Times - Max Strasser
"[Free] is packed with insights, on family as much as on politics. Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound...Free is meant to inspire."
Observer - Luke Harding
"Riveting. . .A wonderfully funny and poignant portrait of a small nation in a state of collapse. . . gloriously readable. . .One of the nonfiction titles of the year, it is destined for literary accolades and popular success"
Financial Times - Frederick Studeman
"Precious little was known about life in communist Albania under Enver Hoxha. That strange world and its legacy is now stunningly brought to life in Lea Ypi’s Free. From protective doublespeak round the kitchen table to the uncertain, and unfulfilled promises of post-communism, Ypi offers a moving and compelling memoir of growing up in turbulent times, as well as a frank questioning of what it really means to be 'free.'"
Vivian Gornick
"Written by an intellectual with storytelling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in modern-day Albania vivid and immediate."
Times Literary Supplement - Misha Glenny
"A uniquely engaging and illuminating account of a young life during a period of intense turmoil... Free offers gem after gem of the bizarre reality that Hoxhaism produced.....Detailing the absurdities of Hoxha’s regime from a child’s perspective, Ypi pulls off the remarkable feat of emphasizing their cruelty with a light and often humorous touch... Free concludes with important lessons about sustaining the ability to ‘reflect, apologize and learn,’ given that ‘people never make history under circumstances they choose.’"
Guardian - Stuart Jeffries
"Utterly engrossing . . . Ypi's memoir is brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and - best of all - funny."
Ed O'Loughlin
"Free is much more than a historical account of a country we know or care little about, except as a punchline for jokes about poverty and atavism. Just as Ypi and her family watched empires crumble, taking whole realities with them, we too are living in catastrophic times, with the geopolitical certainties that have sheltered us for the past century, for better or worse – the US, UK and more recently, the EU – all in various stages of collapse or decay. This, Ypi warns us, is how it will feel when the levee breaks."
Sunday Times - Laura Hackett
"An astonishing and deeply resonant memoir about growing up in the last days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century. . . What makes it so unforgettable is that we see this world, one about which we know so little, through the eyes of a child... It is more fundamentally about humanity, and about the confusions and wonders of childhood. Ypi weaves magic in this book: I was entranced from beginning to end."
Noel Malcolm
"Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others—a really marvelous book."
Library Journal
★ 12/01/2021
Ypi (political theory, London Sch. of Economics; Architectonic of Reason) draws on her academic work for this memoir, which was originally intended to examine overlapping ideas of freedom in liberal and socialist traditions. As she wrote the book, however, the work transformed into one about people and how they are affected by changes in political systems and beliefs—all grounded by Ypi's personal history and her childhood in a repressive regime in Albania. After the 1985 death of Labor Party Secretary Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania for 40 years, Ypi discovered that her parents had been hiding the truth about the regime from her. "Uncle Enver," as he was known to Albanians, was feared, not worshipped; relatives of Ypi's who were said to be at university were actually in prison, and their supposed teachers were actually their jailers and torturers. As Albania spiraled toward civil war, Ypi's world became filled with unrest. The memoir ends with Ypi, as a young woman, leaving to study in the United States. "I never returned," she writes. VERDICT This astonishing memoir is a lively and subtle reflection on the relation between personal and political, in a world where neither old nor new fit without personal loss. Ypi's writing sets itself apart.—David Keymer, Cleveland
APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
This audiobook combines a memoir that translates perfectly to the spoken-word format with a flawless, memorable narration by Rachel Bavidge. Bavidge’s tone and delivery capture every emotion during author Lea Ypi’s journey from repression to freedom. At its core, this is a coming-of-age story of a girl growing up in Communist Albania in a time of dramatic political upheaval. Ypi, who also provides some narration, then describes life in a free country with economic and political challenges all around. Critical to the audiobook’s success is Bavidge’s ability to deliver Ypi’s engaging dialogue flawlessly. Listeners will relish every moment. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2021-10-02
An Albanian writer reflects on her personal experience of her country’s transition out of Soviet-style socialism and into civil war.
Growing up, Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, had complete faith in what she was taught in school. At home, she urged her parents to display a picture of Prime Minister Enver Hoxha—whom she and her classmates called “Uncle Enver”—in their living room. At school, she was thrilled to be chosen to join the Pioneers of Enver, a socialist youth group, a year before the rest of her peers. It wasn’t until the country’s first “free and fair election” that Ypi realized her own parents had never supported the repressive government and, in fact, were grateful to see it fall. Even more shocking were the family secrets that her parents, now unafraid, revealed to her in rapid succession: Her beloved grandmother used to be an aristocrat so well connected that she attended a royal wedding; a “former prime minister whom I had grown up despising” was her great-grandfather; and her mother came from a long line of formerly wealthy property owners. In the years that followed, Ypi weathered not only a changing country, but also a changing sense of self, as she released political beliefs she had held for decades. The author’s narrative voice is stunning, expertly balancing humor, pathos, and deep affection for the characters and places that defined her past. She is adept at immersing readers in her childhood experiences of unquestioned loyalty to “The Party” while also maintaining a tongue-in-cheek, critical distance from what she now recognizes as a tyrannical regime. However, while the scenes and characterizations are captivating, the book lacks a clear narrative arc, making the chapters feel more like a loose collection of memories than a cohesive story.
A poignant, humorous memoir about growing up during the decline and fall of the Iron Curtain.
