Indignity

An imaginative investigation into dignity and historical injustice 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