Excerpt from Free by Lea Ypi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Then he saw me. He looked at me with angry, flashing eyes," Flamur continued. He slightly raised his voice, the same way he did when he started a story about his dad fighting the Ottomans. "He was angry. Very angry," Flamur repeated. "But he didn't hit me. Instead, he started crying, and I returned the can, I returned it immediately. He cried even more, kicked it, jumped on it, and ruined it. I left it there. It was useless, wouldn't even stand on a shelf."

We wondered if it had really happened. Teacher Nora had said that most of the tourist children who visited Albania were from the bourgeois class. They were famously nasty, so nasty that the nastiness of Flamur, and even Arian, paled beside it. Who knew what they were capable of doing to a can?

"Do you think Flamur really took a can from a tourist child?" Marsida asked after Flamur had left.

"It's hard to say," Besa replied. "He does spend a lot of time rummaging in bins to find leftovers for his dogs. He didn't steal it. The child had dropped it in the bin."

"I don't think it's a true story," I said. "I've never met any tourist children."

In school we were told not to interact with people who did not look like us. We were advised to change our route if we stumbled on tourists, and to never, under any circumstances, accept anything they might offer, especially chewing-gum. "Above all, beware of the tourist carrying chewing-gum," teacher Nora insisted.

Sometimes, from a distance, we saw the tourist children who visited the beach in summer, next to the Adriatik, the hotel for foreigners. A long trench in the sand separated the local beach from the foreigners' one, but there were no trenches in the water. On those occasions, my cousins and I would swim near the tourist beach and practise diving or water jumps or somersaults to grab their attention. Sometimes we would sing an English nursery rhyme we knew, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep": "Ban ban backship, eni eni you." They would stare back, with a look between confused and frightened, and my cousins would then urge me to say hello in French. I refused, at first. I refused not because teacher Nora had told us not to speak to tourists—I didn't think the restriction applied in shallow water, where no chewing-gum could be traded—but because I still hated speaking French. If it was so great to speak French, I thought, I shouldn't be teased for it. I shouldn't be asked to speak it only when tourists were involved.

"I don't want to say hello," I protested. "We don't know them. They're not going to answer. Plus, how do you know they speak French? They could speak something else." But my cousins called me a wimp and a coward, and to show them I was not a coward I said a reluctant "Ça va?" The tourist children kept staring. I changed to: "Ciao!" They rolled their eyes. I added the only sentence I knew in German: "Woher kommen sie?" Where do you come from? I should have said, "Where are you going?" because that was the point at which they left. My cousins then said, "See, you scared them. You should have smiled." "Please come back," I muttered to myself, seeing the children disappear behind large multicoloured towels. I hated to see them disappear. I hated them for not answering. The only thing I hated more was that I had succumbed to the pressure.

The tourist children had bright, unusual toys that looked so different from ours that we sometimes wondered if they were toys at all. They splashed around on floating mattresses displaying characters we had never seen, had strangely shaped buckets and spades and exotic plastic material we had no word for. They smelled different, a smell that was enticing in an addictive way, one that made you want to follow them, to go and hug them so you could smell it some more. We always knew when there were tourist children nearby because the beach smelled weird, a hybrid of flowers and butter.

I asked my grandmother what it was. She explained that they smelled of sun cream, a thick white liquid used to protect people from the sun. "We don't have it," she said. "We use olive oil. It's healthier."

Excerpted from Free by Lea Ypi. Copyright © 2022 by Lea Ypi. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.