Freedom to Read – Novels About Book Banning

To help save a bookstore stuck in the past, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything. Maggie will have to decide what’s more important: the books that formed a small town’s history, or the stories poised to change it all.

When Lula Dean, trying to rid public libraries of “pornographic” books, starts her own lending library in front of her home, Lindsay, the daughter of Lula’s arch nemesis, sneaks in nightly, secretly filling it with banned books wrapped in “wholesome” dust jackets, changing the lives of those who borrow them in unexpected ways.

Inspired by the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime–the WWII organization founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors to use books as “weapons in the war of ideas”–The Librarian of Burned Books is an unforgettable historical novel, a haunting love story, and a testament to the beauty, power, and goodness of the written word.

Corobca frames her hilarious and poignant English-language debut as a series of letters regarding a notebook kept over the course of five months in 1974 by a Romanian bureaucrat. A Censor’s Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths.

Despite their strained relationship, when Gia’s sister, Margot, begs her to come home to help with their ailing mother, Gia knows she has no choice. As the town, including members of the book club, takes sides between Gia and Mr. Hart, her former teacher who was fired after Gia accused him of sexual misconduct, everything gets harder. Fortunately, she learns that there are people she can depend on. And by standing up for the truth, she finds a future in the town she thought had rejected her.

New York, present day. Maddie commutes home to her family to reset. Struggling to fully turn off from her work, she is surprised to come across a pre-war German diary amongst her Grandpa’s things. And when she starts to dig into the diary, Maddie’s shocked by what she finds.

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.

When Darcy returns to work following the loss of a loved one, she is met by unrest in her community and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs. Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself.