Free

Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award
The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir
A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks)
The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021
Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021
A Guardian Best Book of the Year
A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans.

For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania's Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests.

Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One's "biography"—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one's individual...