The Book Censor's Library

By Bothayna Al-Essa

Book Overview

FINALIST, National Book Award for Translated Literature, 2024

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The Book Censor's Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1632063344
• ISBN13: 9781632063342
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 4.9" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

What an imaginative book

This book is evocative of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Animal House. A wonderful fable set in the near future in a land that attempts to ban imagination, even in children, in part by banning all books that require interpretation. The narrator, a good citizen of the regime, is happy to become a book censor, but then he gets an assignment to review a novel that resonates with him, and soon he is questioning all that he thought he knew, and his average life is in grave danger.