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Bothayna Al-Essa is the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional children’s books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. More about this author >
Ranya Abdelrahman is a translator of Arabic literature into English. After working for more than 16 years in the information technology industry, she changed careers to pursue her interest in books, promoting reading and translation. More about this author >
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the British Omani Society, and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, among others. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Translated from the Arabic
From the publisher:
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, pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter, and the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams. 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, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.
The Book Censor’s Library is a frenzied testament to the power of literature. Bothayna Al-Essa playfully interweaves influences from around the world and throughout history into a gripping tale of a family man in the throes of a forbidden passion for books. The English of Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain is nimble, vivid, and full of grace, resulting in an alarming work, filled with care as well as warning, that will resonate deeply with American readers today.
