Free
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  • Published: 28 October 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141999142
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $26.00

Free

Coming of Age at the End of History

Formats & editions
Paperback
31 May 2022
EBook
28 Oct 2021
Audiobook
28 Oct 2021
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An unforgettable coming of age story exploring the meaning of freedom - personal, collective, political - from an extraordinary new voice

Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope.

Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment, and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant.

Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history.
  • Published: 28 October 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141999142
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi is a professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize. It is being translated into nineteen languages.

Praise for Free

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 East West Street

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

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 Albania vivid and immediate

Vivian Gornick, author of Unfinished Business

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

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Noel Malcolm, author of Agents of Empire