Indignity

'A magical literary feat and one of the most touching books I’ve read this year' Stuart Jeffries, Spectator

'Beguiling and moving... a clever hybrid, happily exploiting the many possibilities of telling a life story... also an oblique history of 20th-century Albania, illuminating all its perversities, absurdities and ruthlessness' William Boyd, Observer


An imaginative investigation into historical injustice, dignity and truth -- told through the story of a family from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the dawn of Communism in the Balkans

‘There is something about the human spirit, she would say, that withstands all attempts at offence, injury or humiliation … we call it dignity’

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?