When she was a girl, barely eleven years old, Lea Ypi witnessed the end of the world. At least from the end of a world. In 1990 the communist regime in Albania, the last bastion of Stalinism in Europe, collapsed.

She, indoctrinated at school, did not understand why the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were torn down, but with the monuments the secrets and silences also fell: the mechanisms of population control, the murders of the secret police, were revealed. .

The change in the political system gave way to democracy, but not everything was rosy. The transition towards liberalism meant the restructuring of the economy, the massive loss of jobs, the wave of migration to Italy, corruption and the bankruptcy of the country.

In the family environment, that period brought unprecedented surprises for Lea: she discovered what the "universities" were where her parents had supposedly "studied" and why they spoke in code or in whispers; She learned that an ancestor had been part of a government before communism and that her family's property had been expropriated.

A mixture of memoirs, historical essay and socio-political reflection, with the addition of prose of superb literary craftsmanship and touches of humor tending towards the absurd – as it could not be otherwise, given the place and time that is portrayed –, Libre es de a dazzling lucidity: it reflects, from personal experience, a turbulent moment of political transformation that did not necessarily lead to justice and freedom.

«It is read with great pleasure. A subtle inquiry into the meaning of freedom, and a funny and moving portrait of a small country in the throes of collapse” (Luke Harding, The Guardian).

"A brilliant disquisition on freedom: its lures, false hopes, deceptions and possibilities" (Lyndsey Stonebridge, The New Statesman).

«A lyrical, deep and emotional memoir, which exudes an intense smell of humanity, a mixture of reality and hope» (Philippe Sands).