Indignity
A Life Reimagined
-
- €12.99
Publisher Description
*Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction*
‘A magical literary feat and one of the most touching books I’ve read this year’ Stuart Jeffries, Spectator
‘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
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 marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. 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, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?
Named a Book of the Year by Financial Times, Sunday Times, Prospect, TLS, Washington Post, NPR
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heartfelt account, bestselling memoirist Ypi (Free) doggedly investigates her grandmother's shadowy life story. When a mysterious photograph is posted online featuring her grandparents on their 1941 honeymoon in the Alps, Ypi is taken aback by their apparent happiness in the midst of WWII, as well as by comments below the post accusing her grandmother, Leman Ypi, of collaborating with either the communists or fascists. In search of the truth, Ypi delves into crumbling state archives, and pieces together a vivid recreation of Leman's life. Born to a wealthy family in Greece before moving to Albania as a young woman, Leman, in Ypi's telling, saw her path repeatedly intersect with the tumultuous geopolitics of the early 20th century, from a post-WWI population exchange to fascist Italy and Nazi-occupied Albania to the rise of Communism. The latter led to the imprisonment of her husband (the author's grandfather) for "collaboration with British intelligence officers" and to Leman being relegated to working as a sewer cleaner. The narrative can, at times, devolve into a dizzying array of governments, military takeovers, and insurgent political movements. However, the profound descriptions of Leman's struggles are poignant, as is Ypi's "oscillat between curiosity, frustration, and resentment" as she meticulously attempts to balance family lore with inconsistent and sometimes seemingly inaccurate records. It's a moving meditation on the quagmire of probing the gaps in one's family history.
