'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 'Stunningly multilayered
Indignity explores what happens when philosophies meet history when decisions have to be made
at the point of a gun' Prospect 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?
