by Lea Ypi
First published 2025
Lea Ypi thought all records of her grandmother Leman's youth had vanished when Albanian communist police confiscated her family's belongings. Then a stranger posts a 1941 photograph online showing Leman honeymooning in the Italian Alps with her husband Asllan, smiling during World War II's darkest days. This discovery launches Ypi into an investigation that spans Ottoman Salonica, modern Greece and Albania, wartime Europe, and the rise of Balkan communism. She traces Leman's journey from Ottoman aristocracy to Tirana, where she married a socialist whose father led a collaborationist government. Working through secret police files, court records, and fractured family memories, Ypi reconstructs not just her grandmother's hidden life but entire lost worlds. The same questions that drive her research once obsessed Albanian communist investigators. Moving between past and present, archives and imagination, Ypi examines how individuals navigate historical forces beyond their control and asks what moral authority we possess to judge previous generations.
Genres: biography, history, literary-fiction, 20th-century, memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: haunting, intimate, investigative, reflective, thought-provoking
Tropes: fragmented-narrative, generational-trauma, historical-investigation, unreliable-memory
Setting: Albania, Tirana, Ottoman Salonica, Greece, Italian Alps, Balkans, Europe
Period: 1941, World War II, Ottoman era, Communist era, 20th century
368 pages · Paperback · Allen Lane
Content warnings: colonialism, war