Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club named Lea Ypi’s memoir “Free” as its July monthly read, and Lipa’s recommendation for this one went deep.
The announcement came through the Service95 Book Club Instagram account. Lipa wrote the endorsement herself. It reads more like a personal letter than a standard book pitch. She was clearly struck by this one.
“Lea Ypi was 11 when socialism fell in Albania,” Lipa wrote. “Until this point, she had loved Stalin and Uncle Enver Hoxha – who ruled Albania with an iron fist for over 40 years – with a child’s unquestioning devotion.”
The memoir traces Ypi’s early years in one of Europe’s most isolated regimes. Lipa described an Albania “so politically isolated it had fallen out not only with the West, but also with the Soviet Union and China, too.” Through a child’s eyes, that strangeness felt completely normal.
One detail Lipa highlighted is the kind that sticks. An entire chapter of “Free” centers on a Coke can. In Ypi’s Albania, an empty can was a status symbol – something worth coveting. Ypi’s mother saved up to buy one. It went missing. A neighborhood feud erupted. The feud eventually settled. Everyone had already moved on to Fanta.
It’s a funny story. And it quietly sets up the harder one that follows.
Socialism fell. The freedom everyone had waited for finally arrived – but not the way anyone had imagined. Factories closed and jobs disappeared. Families were separated, and civil war broke out. Ypi found herself asking a question the book doesn’t let go of: what does it actually mean to be free?
Lipa is Albanian-British and has spoken openly about her family’s roots in the country. The memoir clearly hit close to home. “Free revealed things to me about a country I know and love well,” she wrote. “The history is so recent, but the lived experience has changed so much in just one generation. What an era to live through, what an education to share.”
“Free” was first published in 2021. Ypi is a political theorist. She draws on her own childhood memories to tell a story about idealism and its collapse – what people believed, what they hoped for, and what they actually got.
Service95 is the media brand Lipa founded. It runs a newsletter alongside the book club, and a podcast is now in the works. The Service95 Book Club podcast is coming soon, giving readers a space to dig into the monthly selections together.
A book club announcement drawing nearly 370,000 likes is hard to ignore. The comments brought in longtime Ypi readers alongside plenty of newcomers discovering her for the first time.
Subscribers to the Service95 newsletter get the full monthly read experience, with additional content tied to each selection.
