Hello,

This week, we've found 13 new and notable books for your reading pleasure. You'll find eight below, and the full list on our Publishing This Week page (under the "What's New" menu tab).

They include Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi, which our members read and reviewed for our early reader program First Impressions. I read it too, and, honestly, it's a stunner.

Ypi (pronounced as you would say the letters E P) is now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but not that long ago she was a teenager in Albania during the waning days of the last Stalinist regime in Europe (which came to an abrupt end in February 1991), and she writes from this perspective, with incredible humor, warmth and insight.

Albania has been a member of the Europen Union now for two decades, but things were very different when I was a teenager in England in the 1980s. At that time, essentially all of Eastern Europe was inaccessible unless traveling with a specialist tour group, but Albania was in a league of its own--the bogeyman of Europe. So, I found Free fascinating for the chance to see behind its particularly rigid iron curtain. But even if you have no view of Albania and would struggle to find it on a map (north of Greece, south of the former Yugoslavia, just across the Adriatic from the heel of Italy), I think there is a good chance you'll find Ypi's engaging memoir well worth your time.

Enjoy!

Davina Morgan-Witts
BookBrowse Publisher