Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Award Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award • Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker , Washington Post , Financial Times , Guardian , Times Literary Supplement , Foreign Affairs , Public Books , and Sunday Times In a memoir that is by turns "bitingly, if darkly, funny…and truly profound" (Max Strasser, New York Times ), Lea Ypi reflects on "freedom" as she recounts living through the end Communism in the Balkans as a child. "Beguiling…[A] primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust." ―Charles King, Washington Post Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had believed to be a kindly leader who loved children, was beheaded by student protestors. Uncomfortable truths about her family’s background emerged. Lea learned that when her parents and neighbors had spoken in whispers of friends going to “university” or relatives “dropping out,” they meant something much more sinister. As she learned the truth about her family’s past, her best friend fled the country. Together with neighboring post-Communist states, Albania began a messy transition to join the “free markets” of the Western world: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. Her father, despite his radical left-wing convictions, was forced to fire workers; her mother became a conservative politician on the model of Margaret Thatcher. Lea’s typical teen concerns about relationships and the future were shot through with the existential: the nation was engulfed in civil war. Ypi’s outstanding literary gifts enable her to weave together this colorful, tumultuous coming-of-age story in a time of social upheaval with thoughtful, fresh, and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, and on deep questions about freedom: What does freedom consist of, and for whom? What conditions foster it? Who among us is truly free?

A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical self-help' - Adam Tooze'Full of fresh - and often surprising - ideas' - Niall Ferguson'Extraordinary... One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times' - Michael IgnatieffWe thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart.In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been working to create a connected world. They've integrated the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of warfare.Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to full-blown war in eastern Europe. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US, Russia and China; an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change and pandemic response; and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as the theatre of conflict expands to include sanctions, cyberwar and the pressures of large migrant flows.A leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard lays out the ways that globalization has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, and explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

WINNER OF THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE New Yorker • Best Books of 2022 An award-winning international sensation―with a second-act dystopian twist― Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. “At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter ’s enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. “In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine’s assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives―a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself. “A trickster at heart, and often very funny” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker ), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers). 19 drawings