FREE

If you read one memoir this year, let it be this

A magical, timeless and important account of what life was really like under communism. Free brims with diamond-studded details, it lays bare the compromises, fear and betrayals of a secret police state, but is also an uplifting and humorous reminder of how much the human spirit can endure

Lea Ypi's Free is the first book since Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend that I have pressed on family, friends and colleagues, insisting they read it. . . a truly riveting memoir and a profound meditation on what it means to be free

Enthralling. . . a classic in the making

Ypi's deliciously smart memoir of her Albanian girlhood at the end of the Cold War is a brilliant disquisition on the meanings of freedom - its lures, false hopes, disappointments and possibilities - in our time

A tart and tender childhood memoir. But also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose. . . A quick read, but like Marx's spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you

An absorbing memoir of Ypi's Albanian childhood and its ideological delusions. The freedom she discovers is far more complex than we might expect