Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Award Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award • Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker , Washington Post , Financial Times , Guardian , Times Literary Supplement , Foreign Affairs , Public Books , and Sunday Times In a memoir that is by turns "bitingly, if darkly, funny…and truly profound" (Max Strasser, New York Times ), Lea Ypi reflects on "freedom" as she recounts living through the end Communism in the Balkans as a child. "Beguiling…[A] primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust." ―Charles King, Washington Post Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had believed to be a kindly leader who loved children, was beheaded by student protestors. Uncomfortable truths about her family’s background emerged. Lea learned that when her parents and neighbors had spoken in whispers of friends going to “university” or relatives “dropping out,” they meant something much more sinister. As she learned the truth about her family’s past, her best friend fled the country. Together with neighboring post-Communist states, Albania began a messy transition to join the “free markets” of the Western world: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. Her father, despite his radical left-wing convictions, was forced to fire workers; her mother became a conservative politician on the model of Margaret Thatcher. Lea’s typical teen concerns about relationships and the future were shot through with the existential: the nation was engulfed in civil war. Ypi’s outstanding literary gifts enable her to weave together this colorful, tumultuous coming-of-age story in a time of social upheaval with thoughtful, fresh, and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, and on deep questions about freedom: What does freedom consist of, and for whom? What conditions foster it? Who among us is truly free? "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." ― Max Strasser, New York Times Book Review "A young life unfolding amid great historical change: ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life." ― Tara Westover, author of Educated "Utterly engrossing . . . Ypi's memoir is brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and - best of all - funny." ― Stuart Jeffries, Guardian " 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, coauthor of The Light That Failed "Written by an intellectual with storytelling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in modern-day Albania vivid and immediate." ― Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City "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 "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.… 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 "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." ― Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo "This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated , but it is so much more than that." ― David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends "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,