Why we need to protect our libraries now more than ever

On Sunday, some readers received the previous week’s email – we apologise for the error. Here is this week’s newsletter

This week we reported on shocking news from both the US – Utah has become the first state to outlaw a list of books statewide – and here in the UK, where Liverpool’s Spellow Lane Library Hub suffered severe damage after rioters set fire to it. As counter-protesters in Walthamstow, east London, chanted on Wednesday night, though, “when fascists attack, we fight back”: a fundraising campaign to restore Spellow Hub raised more than £120,000 in just two days.

For today’s newsletter I spoke to authors about why we need to protect our libraries at all costs – you can read that right after this week’s top picks. And American novelist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah shares what he’s been reading lately.

After 14 years of Tory cuts to public funding, libraries have become the answer for many people seeking not just books but children’s activities, language-learning resources, asylum support, or just somewhere to stay warm, Aida Edemariam showed in her recent long read about Britain’s libraries. And libraries themselves have suffered from council cuts, with reports last month that librarians’ jobs could be under threat of being replaced by self-service technology.

Novelist Guy Gunaratne thinks the reason people were so quick to respond to the library attack in Liverpool is because when we “see such vulnerable spaces become violently defaced”, it “awakens in us the same human instinct to protect as when seeing vulnerable people beset by mindless violence”.

“For a library, particularly one like Spellow Lane which has focused its limited resources on providing for deprived communities, to have become the target of hateful mobs is as heartbreaking as it is outrageous,” Gunaratne adds.

The In Our Mad and Furious City author’s local library when growing up in London’s Willesden Green was “the first supportive environment I discovered when making my first steps into literacy,” they say. “Without those quiet corners to read in I would not have become a writer myself.”

Children’s author Anne Fine also says she owes her career to libraries: “I couldn’t have had a shadow of the life I’ve had without everything they offer.”

“So much of our lives is spent getting and spending,” she adds. “Libraries offer something so much deeper and more enriching. They are the doorway to a fuller life for everyone who uses them, from the pensioner reading one of the free papers, to the refugee getting to grips with a new language, to the toddler enchanted by bright shiny pictures and an engaging story.”

Though it is rousing to see so many donate to Spellow Hub at this time of emergency, libraries need more than just protecting, “they deserve more investment”, author and screenwriter Nikesh Shukla thinks. “Libraries provide so many useful services for people, not just offering free access to books. They are important community spaces and pivotal in so many people’s lives.”

Gunaratne agrees: “Libraries are for the people. We protect libraries because they are among the only spaces that exist solely to nurture human flourishing.”

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas is an awe-inspiring book. I think people say “awe-inspiring” too often, but in this case I am not being hyperbolic. In his first novel (his memoir, Sink, came out last year) Spunkmeyer gets inside the head of a former army medic and current graduate student in North Philadelphia who works shifts in the emergency department of a local hospital. This is a book supercharged with language that feels essentially true and uncompromising. I found it infinitely impressive.

Little Rot, the latest novel by Akwaeke Emezi, is another book full of wondrous language. What I loved about this one was the sensuality that is pressed right against harsh violence, as five characters each have their lives upended over the course of a weekend.

• Chain-Gang All-Stars is out in paperback now (Vintage £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.