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Raise Your Soul

A Personal History of Resistance

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Raise Your Soul

By: Yanis Varoufakis
Narrated by: Yanis Varoufakis
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A captivating portrait of number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis’s political awakening, told through the extraordinary lives of five women, and the West’s tumultuous history from 1924 to the present.

Eleni put an arm around him and said: ‘Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do.’

When Yanis Varoufakis was eight years old, his uncle made him a model airplane out of matchsticks and cigarette papers; all he could find in his cell. Yet, to his dismay, his mother Eleni broke open the fragile gift, revealing a hidden message: instructions for fellow dissidents ahead of their forthcoming court martial. It was 1969 and Uncle Panayis was a political prisoner, captured and tortured for resisting the military dictatorship.

Dramatic in scope and deep in feeling, Raise Your Soul is an intimate portrait of three generations caught up in the whirlwind of history. It is also a remarkable narrative spanning one hundred years, beginning in post-colonial Egypt in the 1920s, and then tracing Greece’s tumultuous century through Nazi occupation, communist resistance, civil war, Cold War fracture, fascist dictatorship, socialist revival and present-day economic crisis.

At its heart are the women whose resilience, defiance and courage inspired the visionary economist most: Eleni, Anna, Trisevgeni, Georgia and Danaë. Through their lives, Varoufakis not only lays bare his own political soul, but confronts the dark forces of authoritarianism that still haunt Europe and beyond, reigniting hope in all of us that we can rise once more.

© Yanis Varoufakis 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Europe Freedom & Security Greece Politicians Politics & Activism Politics & Government Heartfelt Africa Authoritarianism War Socialism Imperialism

Critic reviews

This is a gripping book - written with compassion and wit - by a uniquely gifted and multi-faceted writer. It’s a history of modern Greece, it’s a biography of an extraordinary family, and sometimes it reads like a thriller. Most of all though it’s a humble homage to the truly unusual women who have moulded and enriched Yanis Varoufakis’s unusual life. I strongly recommend it (Brian Eno)
A deeply heart-breaking, funny and enraging portrait
Behind every good man there’s a good woman. In Yanis Varoufakis’s case, there are several. Written with a historian’s grasp of events, an economist’s rationalization of how things work, and most of all, a storyteller’s understanding of the human condition, this is not just their story, but ours (Irvine Welsh)
I read with huge interest, enjoyment - and enlightenment (Paul Cartledge)
Beautiful and inspiring, I couldn't put it down (Rosie Holt)
A fierce work tracing Greece’s past century – war, civil war, occupation, dictatorship, resistance – through five of the most powerful women in Varoufakis’s life. ... Five women who tell truths, take risks, and protect family; women who organise – despite illiteracy or social status; women whose resolve shows us how class differences in education, networks, and resources determine collusion or resistance, life or death. To read this book as memoir, biography, or autobiography, however, is to diminish its impact: this is an unmistakably political work that tells your story just as profoundly as it reveals mine. ... Raise Your Soul sits alongside Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe, Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and, of course, Costa-Gavras’s Z ...To sit with Varoufakis’s words is a gift: a masterful writer and orator, his practice champions the interconnectedness of the cultural and the civic (Esther Anatolitis)
A new book by Yanis Varoufakis, one of the most important political figures of our times, is always momentous (Ken Loach)
All stars
Most relevant
Loved the story of the struggles of females in his family’s past from Egypt and Greece to the present day. I will definitely re listen to this.

Shining a light on little spoken of past

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