Eight books by writers from Albania, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Chronicle in Stone and Broken April.
Albania's best-known writer is Ismail Kadare, who in 2005 won the first Man Booker International Prize. Albanian has two main dialects, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south, and the northern highlands have an oral tradition of epic songs sung to the lahuta, a one-stringed instrument. Under Enver Hoxha's communist rule, writers worked under state control, and Kadare settled in France in 1990.
Kadare's Broken April portrays blood feuds under the Kanun, the medieval highland code, in the 1930s. Fatos Kongoli's The Loser looks back on life in communist Tirana. Lea Ypi's memoir Free recalls growing up in Tirana through Hoxha's last years and the 1997 pyramid-scheme unrest. Elvira Dones wrote Sworn Virgin in Italian; it tells of a northern Albanian woman who lives as a man under highland tradition.
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A boy's view of Gjirokastër's stone houses and mixed communities as Italian, Greek and German occupations pass through during the Second World War.
Blood feuds under the medieval Kanun code in the northern highlands, where custom governs life and death in the 1930s.
A memoir of growing up in Tirana through the last years of Hoxha's regime, the 1990 collapse and the 1997 pyramid-scheme unrest.
Follows a northern Albanian woman who lives as a man under highland tradition, then rebuilds her life after leaving.
A disillusioned man looks back on life in communist Tirana, showing surveillance, privilege and the compromises of ordinary life.
An Italian general travels the Albanian countryside in the 1960s to recover his war dead, showing the landscape and its memory of the war.
A fictional account of the death of Hoxha's designated heir, showing the paranoia and secrecy of the Tirana leadership.
Post-communist Albania: the Kanun revived in the highlands and the uneasy freedoms of the early 1990s.
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