The evening I finished Lea Ypi’s brilliant and moving new book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, I shared a meal in a famous Belgrade pizzeria with two Serbian women in their late forties. Like Ypi, they had also been teenagers amid the last gasps of twentieth-century European state socialism. One woman had been a junior in secondary school and the other a first-year student in university when the country in which they had been born and raised imploded.

As the younger of the two women, who had spent more than twenty years in the West, explained over a glass of Orangina:

I was in Novi Sad when the war started. My father was forty-nine, just young enough to be conscripted. He was supposed to deliver conscription notices to men in our neighborhood, but he couldn’t do it.