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(3.75) I knew next to nothing about Communist Albania (apart from what showed up in the novel Brass) before picking this up on account of its shortlisting for the Costa Award. It’s pretty astonishing that there was a country still in this condition in the 1970s-80s: Ypi writes, “When I was born, the chances of survival were put at thirty per cent. My parents dared not give me a name but celebrated the hospital number I was assigned: 471.�� Days-long queues for food and kerosene were common. The cover tells a humorous yet troubling story: an empty Coke can, displayed as a decoration, was a status symbol fought over by her family and their neighbours. People were desperate to get out of the country.

There came a turning point in December 1990, when the first free election in decades was held, but civil war was still on the way in 1997, a time Ypi records through her diary entries from the time. I enjoyed the recreation of her childhood perspective, though I might have liked at least a short retrospective section from adulthood. The book is quite funny despite the often sobering realities of life as she recounts her parents�� shifting fortunes and the fates of friends and classmates. I was surprised to learn that the family was Muslim, and that the author’s first language was French thanks to her grandmother; Albania is a real mix of cultures (I had to look on a map: it’s above Greece and just across a short stretch of water from Italy).

In an epilogue, Ypi writes that this book was initially going to be more of a political and philosophical study “about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and socialist traditions��; I’m glad we got this instead, as there were already two general nonfiction studies of freedom published in 2021, by Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson, and a third would have felt like overkill plus would have lacked the charm of a memoir of childhood. “This book was written mostly from a cupboard in Berlin during the Covid-19 pandemic,�� she says. In her grandmother’s words, “When it’s difficult to see clearly into the future, you have to think about what you can learn from the past.��