Borrowed is a novel that explores love, broken families, forgotten lives, and the dignity of ordinary people facing marginalisation, poverty, social injustice, and the effects of corruption on everyday life. Set in Tirana and other cities of Albania, it follows Luan Kodra and the people whose lives intertwine with his. Through their experiences, the novel paints a human picture of life in there, the streets, people memories, struggles, affection, and hope. The novel also shows how loss, disappointment, and repeated hardship can change the way a person sees himself and the world around him. When Luan, a bookseller in Tirana, loses almost everything that once mattered to him, despair takes hold. He begins hearing a strange voice inside his head. He recalls events and stories from his past with deep nostalgia, trying to understand why everything happened as it did. As he travels through Albania, reality and fantasy become increasingly difficult to separate, while his trust in his own mind and in the person, he believes himself to be slowly weakens. Along the way, Luan encounters a variety of people; men, women, and young people; whose lives are defined by both poverty, violence, abandon, love and loss. Through their stories he is able to see how other people experience things differently than he does. He comes to realise that there are many ways in which an individual's emotional pain can cause them just as much distress (if not more) than physical. Luan finds solace in books, literature, philosophy, and even his imagination. At the same time however, these are all part of Luan's conflict. As he begins to admire the characters he reads about and/or hears about through other media forms; the images of those characters start to define how he views himself. This leads to confusion for Luan. He is unsure if he is losing his grasp of what is real or gaining insight into who he really is or simply transforming into somebody new. At its core, Borrowed presents issues with implications far beyond the life of one individual. How does it affect a person when isolation, financial hardship, injustice, and multiple disappointments begin to disassemble who a person used to be? To where do individuals go when all they have is the dream of an escape from a hopeless existence? Can there be any love left when people’s dignity has been stripped away so easily? And when society abandons people in pain, can it really blame them for what they become?