Krenar—the word means proud in Albanian. It’s an apt title for the fierce pride writer Albina Sufaj feels for her ancestors native land in describing the centuries of oppression by the Ottoman Empire beginning in the fifteenth century to Albanian independence in 1912—in which the Great Powers of Europe divided half of its land and people to neighbouring states that still stings to this day.

“Most children drift to sleep listening to the quiet hum of their parents reading fairy tales and singing lullabies to them. My bedtime stories were my father’s recollections of a life before my own,” Sufaj writes. “Albania is everything I know and everything I have been taught. The country encompasses the very foundation of my soul.”

Krenar: A Century of Trials and Tribulations is a collection of hidden sorrows, stolen celebrations and silenced identities.