Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Empire of Pain
- The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions–Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis–an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
-
-
An angry, populist, gossipy book that doesn’t engage seriously with the issues
- By Megan on 01-07-21
-
Of This Our Country
- By: various
- Narrated by: Weruche Opia, Oseloka Obi
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.
-
Disorder
- Hard Times in the 21st Century
- By: Helen Thompson
- Narrated by: Kitty Kelly
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories—one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies—and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.
-
-
A fascinating and important book
- By Adam Boome on 13-05-22
-
The Last Days of Roger Federer
- And Other Endings
- By: Geoff Dyer
- Narrated by: Richard Burnip
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Much attention has been paid to so-called late style—but what about last style? When does last begin? How early is late? When does the end set in? In this endlessly stimulating investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who've mattered to him throughout his life.
-
Berlin
- Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century
- By: Sinclair McKay
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Berlin tells the story of the city as seen through the eyes not of its rulers, but of those who walked its streets. In this magisterial biography of a city and its inhabitants, best-selling historian Sinclair McKay sheds new light on well-known characters—from idealistic scientist Albert Einstein to Nazi architect Albert Speer—and draws on never-before-seen first-person accounts to introduce us to people of all walks of Berlin life.
-
Aftermath
- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos? In bombed-out Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, journalist and member of the Nazi resistance, warms herself by a makeshift stove and records in her diary how a frenzy of expectation and industriousness grips the city.
-
-
Important story poorly narrated
- By Amazon Customer on 21-12-21
-
Empire of Pain
- The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions–Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis–an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
-
-
An angry, populist, gossipy book that doesn’t engage seriously with the issues
- By Megan on 01-07-21
-
Of This Our Country
- By: various
- Narrated by: Weruche Opia, Oseloka Obi
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.
-
Disorder
- Hard Times in the 21st Century
- By: Helen Thompson
- Narrated by: Kitty Kelly
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories—one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies—and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.
-
-
A fascinating and important book
- By Adam Boome on 13-05-22
-
The Last Days of Roger Federer
- And Other Endings
- By: Geoff Dyer
- Narrated by: Richard Burnip
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Much attention has been paid to so-called late style—but what about last style? When does last begin? How early is late? When does the end set in? In this endlessly stimulating investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who've mattered to him throughout his life.
-
Berlin
- Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century
- By: Sinclair McKay
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Berlin tells the story of the city as seen through the eyes not of its rulers, but of those who walked its streets. In this magisterial biography of a city and its inhabitants, best-selling historian Sinclair McKay sheds new light on well-known characters—from idealistic scientist Albert Einstein to Nazi architect Albert Speer—and draws on never-before-seen first-person accounts to introduce us to people of all walks of Berlin life.
-
Aftermath
- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos? In bombed-out Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, journalist and member of the Nazi resistance, warms herself by a makeshift stove and records in her diary how a frenzy of expectation and industriousness grips the city.
-
-
Important story poorly narrated
- By Amazon Customer on 21-12-21
-
Serious Money
- Walking Plutocratic London
- By: Caroline Knowles
- Narrated by: Caroline Knowles
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
London is a plutocrat's paradise, with more resident billionaires than New York, Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down, their wealth is burning up the environment and swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super rich, and the lives they lead? To find out more about this secretive, security-heavy elite, sociologist Caroline Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey, via Kensington, Notting Hill, Mayfair and elsewhere.
-
-
Vibrant sociology
- By EEL on 29-06-22
-
A Brief History of Equality
- By: Thomas Piketty
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding, a perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.
-
-
Better on paper
- By Anonymous User on 04-08-22
-
The Age of the Strongman
- How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World
- By: Gideon Rachman
- Narrated by: Gideon Rachman, John Hopkins
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are in a new era: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh and Washington. These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against globalist elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiments of their nations.
-
-
Fascinating, well written book
- By Joseph on 10-07-22
-
The Last Days
- A Memoir of Faith, Desire and Freedom
- By: Ali Millar
- Narrated by: Ali Millar
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1982 and in the Kingdom Hall we are Jehovah's Witnesses. The state of the world shows us the end is close, and Satan is like a roaring lion, seeking to devour us. Ali Millar is waiting for Armageddon. Born into the Jehovah's Witnesses in a town in the Scottish Borders, her childhood revolves around regular meetings in the Kingdom Hall, where she is haunted by vivid images of the Second Coming, her mind populated by the bodies that will litter the earth upon Jehovah's return. In this frightening, cloistered world, Ali grows older.
-
-
the truth will out...
- By Anonymous User on 16-07-22
-
Orwell's Roses
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Roses, pleasure, and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world. "Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening" wrote George Orwell in 1940. Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.
-
Elite Capture
- How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)
- By: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
- Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smth
- Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
-
Black Spartacus
- The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
- By: Sudhir Hazareesingh
- Narrated by: Sudhir Hazareesingh, Ben Arogundade
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791 and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent Black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's Black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, he ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'the most unhappy man of men', imprisoned in a fortress in France.
-
-
Narration detracts
- By Gruffydd P. Jones on 20-09-20
-
Islands of Abandonment
- Life in the Post-Human Landscape
- By: Cal Flyn
- Narrated by: Cal Flyn
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live—or survive in tiny, precarious numbers—to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop.
-
-
A Must Read
- By Tony Fitzgerald on 29-01-21
-
Lalechka
- By: Amira Keidar
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's a warm and muggy Saturday night in August of 1942. The Nazis are liquidating the ghetto of Shedlitz, an industrial town east of Warsaw, Poland. Zippa, a 27-year-old Jewish woman, finds temporary shelter in a small attic, together with her baby daughter and 100 frightened Jews. When the Nazi noose is tightened around her neck, Zippa asks her husband Jacob, a Jewish policeman in the ghetto, to save their little girl from certain death. The young father manages to smuggle his wife and daughter to the gentile part of town.
-
Super-Infinite
- The Transformations of John Donne
- By: Katherine Rundell
- Narrated by: Jamie Parker
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of 10 children and was often ill and in pain.
-
-
A super-excellent biography
- By Rachel Redford on 18-05-22
-
Children of the Night
- The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania
- By: Paul Kenyon
- Narrated by: Paul Kenyon
- Length: 19 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful king and his vivacious, British-born queen, the country oscillated wildly.
-
-
Best audio book that I have bought!!
- By Meurigfa on 13-06-22
-
The Chief Witness
- Escape from China's Modern-Day Concentration Camps
- By: Sayragul Sauytbay, Alexandra Cavelius
- Narrated by: Xifeng Brooks
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born in China’s northwestern province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime? Being Kazakh, one of China’s ethnic minorities. The northwestern province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years, it has become home to more than 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities.
-
-
5 stars to sauytbay. I gave one star to ccp
- By sean quinn on 14-10-21
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford prize and the 2021 Costa Biography Award.
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope.
Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant.
Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history.
Critic reviews
"Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come.... Beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world." (David Runciman)
What listeners say about
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 04-11-21
must read
truly incredible book, would give it 6 stars if I could. very well written and a remarkable journey.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Miss Julie Wright
- 23-12-21
A powerful and enthralling read.
What a great listen.
I was absolutely engrossed from start to finish.
The way Lea Ypi has told her stories bring human experience to the big political backdrop of Communist and post-Communist Albania (and, I feel, Eastern Europe more broadly).
I found it utterly fascinating!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Zofia Jaworek
- 07-01-22
My favourite kind of book
This book has so much of what I love about reading. Colorful characters and interesting story are one thing, but a chance to step into someone else shoes, see life at different angle, take the old and familiar and give it all a new flavour - this is what great storytelling is. I finished the book feeling my head expanded and my heart grew a little.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Rachel Redford
- 28-12-21
when university meant prison camp
Lea Ypi was 13 when Comrade Enver Hoxha the Stalinist communist leader of her country Albania died. She had been a keen child communist and accepted Hoxha as revered leader (she had even wanted his picture displayed in their home) and she couldn’t understand why her parents seemed to have different feelings. Lea Ypi now teaches Political Theory at the LSE and this memoir is on one level a child’s eye view of the disintegration of a country (and her family) and an adult inquiry into the nature of ‘freedom’.
There was a great deal that Ypi didn’t understand about her family and her country when she was a child, not least the mysterious importance attached to ‘biography’. During the Hoxha years she was impressed by all her family members who’d been to university and achieved great honours, only to find years later that her parents had been speaking in code and all those accounts of friends and family who had graduated so illustriously in fact had been in prison camps and prisons, survived (or not) dreadful punishments, been executed or committed suicide (the ultimate graduation). She came to understand her parents’ status as intellectuals only later, and how her highly connected Grandmother who spoke only French had suffered such cruel loss in Greece. When she saw pictures in her reading book in late childhood she saw pictures of shops where there were NO QUEUES (Albanian queues could last for days and your place was kept with a stone or a bag), and she experienced her first highly prized Coke can. After Hoxha the family suffered the political collapse of Albania with the failed efforts at reform: the lack of electricity, the rumbling civil unrest – and then the failure of the pyramid saving schemes which lost so many Albanians their life savings and Ypi’s mother joined the emigration and fled to Italy. There’s a huge amount more and the whole is a very special human testament which creates the adult and the child view.
As an audiobook it has a problem which isn’t the narrator’s fault as no doubt she was instructed to read this way. The problem lies with the accents. Ypi’s father didn’t speak English until well into late middle age, which frustrated him; her grandmother spoke only French; Ypi herself resented speaking French and not Albanian, but learned faultless English; others spoke Albanian (and probably other languages too) – language is a very important part of this history freighted with very great significance. The problem is for the narration – how do you read the dialogue? The decision here was to give them regional English accents – Grandmother is aristocratic English and others are rough London, northern or something else. I think this was a mistake. The text tells us what language these people spoke and reading the book you’d have no trouble, but forcing English regional and cultural accents on the listener raises all kinds of issues which are confusing and distracting. I think the only way would have been to read it as the narrator reads the rest – it’s only the dialogue which raises the difficulties. So it only gets a 3 for performance and a 4 overall. The content is definitely a five.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sam Corkindale
- 16-12-21
Fantastic crash course in all things Albania.
Interesting, informative, surprising, moving and exquisitely read. I am in love with the writer and the narrator!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Alex Rushforth
- 12-07-22
Very good reading except the voices
A very interesting memoir on a country I knew nothing about.
The reading is fine, but the childish voices the narrator puts on are completely unlistenable- it’s strange the editors didn’t step in and tell her to stop as they are awful on the ear.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- kiran
- 06-07-22
An excellent book - well worth re-recording...
I really enjoyed Free, both as a tale of childhood in Albania, but also a commentary on Albania's trials under Communism and Capitalism. As several reviewers have already suggested, this audiobook would be much improved if Lea Ypi were to narrate it herself. The comedy English regional accents applied to different characters (seemingly at random) really aren't a good thing...
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 03-07-22
Fascinating BUT Lea Ypi should have read this herself
Interesting book - but seriously held back by the fact the author did not read it herself, so much is lost in the accents of the reader (who did a good job) but in the context of an audiobook fell short. Lea Ypi should consider re-recording this herself
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 09-06-22
Freeeeeedom
Nice autobiography of a childhood lived through a period of upheaval, transformation and violence. It was interesting to read about the authors childhood faith in Hoxhaism and how her beliefs developed as Albania changed. The book is a critique of the lived experience of socialism as well as Western concepts of freedom which is a refreshing angle.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ms
- 20-05-22
Excellent
Lea Ypi has managed to show in an easy, intelligent listen what life was like in communist Albania and during its collapse and change. We hear about what the experience was like for her, for real people, from family, friends, neighbours to the wider community.
You are left understanding how the experience is so much wider than just Albania and how pertinent the question remains currently and globally of how we can create governments and systems for fair and happy societies.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Haim Shalom
- 20-06-22
not what I expected
went in thinking it would be a deep delve into the meaning of socialism and liberalism. as childhood memoirs go, it was good, but I felt the faux childish reading was a mistake.