The Book Censor's Library [Paperback]

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 hasnt slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publishallusions 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 Orwells1984with the madcap absurdity of CarrollsAlice in Wonderland.The Book Censors Libraryis a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

Bothayna Al-Essais the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional childrens books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. Her most recent book,The Book Censor's Library, won the Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category in 2021 and is her third novel to appear in English, afterLost in MeccaandAll That I Want to Forget. Al-Essa was author-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation for the summer of 2023, and the recipient of Kuwaits Nation Encouragement Award for her fiction in 2003 and 2012. She has written books on writing and led writing workshops throughout the Arab world.

Sawad Hussainis a translator from Arals