Indignity: A Life Reimagined

(Paperback)

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The acclaimed author of Free returns with an extraordinary investigation into historical injustice, dignity, truth and imagination When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi- glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941 By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history - and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi's memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. Ultimately, she asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations And what do we really know about the people closest to us

Author Bio

Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and a fellow of the British Academy. Her first trade book, Free- Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty languages.