In Free, her often “astonishing” memoir, Lea Ypi brings to life what it was like to grow up there in the 1980s. Ypi also recalls being baffled by certain conversations she overheard at home, said Emma Duncan in The Times. Only with the collapse of the regime in 1990 (when Ypi was 11) was this solved, along with many other puzzles. The second part of this “gloriously readable” book mordantly documents the aftermath of the regime’s collapse, said Luke Harding in The Observer. Yet Ypi does mourn the loss of some things from her childhood–notably the sense of community that flourished under communism.

Source: The Times January 14, 2022 11:51 UTC