must read

truly incredible book, would give it 6 stars if I could. very well written and a remarkable journey.

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My favourite kind of book

This book has so much of what I love about reading. Colorful characters and interesting story are one thing, but a chance to step into someone else shoes, see life at different angle, take the old and familiar and give it all a new flavour - this is what great storytelling is. I finished the book feeling my head expanded and my heart grew a little.

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when university meant prison camp

Lea Ypi was 13 when Comrade Enver Hoxha the Stalinist communist leader of her country Albania died. She had been a keen child communist and accepted Hoxha as revered leader (she had even wanted his picture displayed in their home) and she couldn’t understand why her parents seemed to have different feelings. Lea Ypi now teaches Political Theory at the LSE and this memoir is on one level a child’s eye view of the disintegration of a country (and her family) and an adult inquiry into the nature of ‘freedom’.
There was a great deal that Ypi didn’t understand about her family and her country when she was a child, not least the mysterious importance attached to ‘biography’. During the Hoxha years she was impressed by all her family members who’d been to university and achieved great honours, only to find years later that her parents had been speaking in code and all those accounts of friends and family who had graduated so illustriously in fact had been in prison camps and prisons, survived (or not) dreadful punishments, been executed or committed suicide (the ultimate graduation). She came to understand her parents’ status as intellectuals only later, and how her highly connected Grandmother who spoke only French had suffered such cruel loss in Greece. When she saw pictures in her reading book in late childhood she saw pictures of shops where there were NO QUEUES (Albanian queues could last for days and your place was kept with a stone or a bag), and she experienced her first highly prized Coke can. After Hoxha the family suffered the political collapse of Albania with the failed efforts at reform: the lack of electricity, the rumbling civil unrest – and then the failure of the pyramid saving schemes which lost so many Albanians their life savings and Ypi’s mother joined the emigration and fled to Italy. There’s a huge amount more and the whole is a very special human testament which creates the adult and the child view.

As an audiobook it has a problem which isn’t the narrator’s fault as no doubt she was instructed to read this way. The problem lies with the accents. Ypi’s father didn’t speak English until well into late middle age, which frustrated him; her grandmother spoke only French; Ypi herself resented speaking French and not Albanian, but learned faultless English; others spoke Albanian (and probably other languages too) – language is a very important part of this history freighted with very great significance. The problem is for the narration – how do you read the dialogue? The decision here was to give them regional English accents – Grandmother is aristocratic English and others are rough London, northern or something else. I think this was a mistake. The text tells us what language these people spoke and reading the book you’d have no trouble, but forcing English regional and cultural accents on the listener raises all kinds of issues which are confusing and distracting. I think the only way would have been to read it as the narrator reads the rest – it’s only the dialogue which raises the difficulties. So it only gets a 3 for performance and a 4 overall. The content is definitely a five.

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A powerful and enthralling read.

What a great listen.
I was absolutely engrossed from start to finish.
The way Lea Ypi has told her stories bring human experience to the big political backdrop of Communist and post-Communist Albania (and, I feel, Eastern Europe more broadly).
I found it utterly fascinating!

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Very interesting

I loved the content of this book but I really wish I had read it. I did not like the style of the narrator. However the epilogue read by the author was excellent. Such a shame she could not have narrated the whole book.

It is interesting to learn about Albania and it's history, which is really so recent. Worth a listen.

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A real thing!

There is a lot of promise in the description of the book before you purchase it and more often than not it falls flat after an hour or two of diving into it. This one is different. It delivers what is promised and exceeds it. I'd love to have more books like this, describing messy yet beautiful reality instead of feeding smooth and polished wannabe experiences.

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Very good reading except the voices

A very interesting memoir on a country I knew nothing about.

The reading is fine, but the childish voices the narrator puts on are completely unlistenable- it’s strange the editors didn’t step in and tell her to stop as they are awful on the ear.

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Fantastic crash course in all things Albania.

Interesting, informative, surprising, moving and exquisitely read. I am in love with the writer and the narrator!

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Great story. Good Narration. Bad impersonations

Great story about a lesser know part of 20th century history. Narrated well apart from the character impersonations which are awful.

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muy interesante

me ha gustado mucho la ejecución y el contenido.

siempre me había preguntado cómo se vivió el fin de los regímenes comunistas en Europa y su transición al neoliberalismo, el libro explica justo eso, cómo vivió la autora (una niña en ese momento) y su familia ese cambio, qué supuso en sus vidas, y cómo se han adaptado al capitalismo neoliberal.

Muy recomendable.

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