Indignity

‘Full of politics and reportage… Full of ideas... Full of history, as it moves from the last days of the Ottoman empire to the last days of the Soviet one.But more than anything, it is full of life - Ypi’s own, and that of her forebears’ Peter Hoskin, Prospect ‘A magical literary feat and one of the most touching books I’ve read this year’ Stuart Jeffries, Spectator 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.W