The Book Censor's Library (2024 Longlist for the National Book Award)

The newly-appointed censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, skimming for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--like allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, or any mention of life before the Revolution. But by night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in every room of the house he shares with his daughter and increasingly irate wife. As the siren song of forbidden reading beckons him further into uncertainty, he descends to a netherworld of resistance fighters, double agents, and outlaw librarians on an urgent mission.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of George Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, adding a dread-laden twist worthy of Franz Kafka. Guardian of Surfaces is a love letter to books and the deliciously dangerous act of losing oneself in them.