Free

An international bestseller about growing up after the fall of the Iron Curtain

What does it mean to be free? After 1989, half of the European continent was asking itself this very question. The answer depended heavily — and still does — on when and where you were born. While people living under communism longed for an end to repression and state surveillance, the arrival of a frequently predatory form of capitalism made them nostalgic — and sometimes still does — for the financial security that is the basic prerequisite for personal fulfilment and freedom.

Albanian author Lea Ypi experienced both. Her childhood in a family of dissidents and intellectuals was bisected by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, giving her a front-row seat to the stark contrast between Hoxha's communist Albania, with its apathetic society, and its capitalist version, where that same society almost disintegrated under the logic of an unrestrained market. Ypi revisits these memories in her internationally acclaimed book, Free, attempting to answer the question of how the post-Soviet era has shaped our concept of freedom. And whether we can, or even know how to be, free at all…

A 2021 Book of the Year according to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times and others.

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Free is one of those very rare books that show how history shapes people's lives and politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant and gifted writer that her story becomes yours.
— Ivan Krastev, writer and political scientist

Free is a beautifully written account of life under Albania's crumbling Stalinist system, and the shock and chaos that followed its collapse.
— The Guardian