Five blacklisted books to get behind

In yesterday’s Saturday magazine we had an extract from Charlie English’s latest book, in which he tells the fascinating story of how the CIA smuggled blacklisted reading material – from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to copies of the Guardian – into Poland during the cold war. I wish we could look back on this form of censorship as a thing of the past. But sadly that’s not the case, there has been a surge in book banning, particularly in the US, over the last few years. Just this week, the actor and children’s book author Julianne Moore spoke out against the Trump administration’s decision to review school library books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.

So for this week’s Bookmarks I’ve come up with a “banned books reading list” – five brilliant titles that are among the most banned in recent times; books that need our support more than ever right now. And for the recommendations section, author of The Transgender Issue and Love in Exile, Shon Faye shares some books she’s loved lately.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I am starting with the obvious choice: Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel in which women are forced to reproduce is one of the most high-profile books to regularly appear on lists of books banned in the US. In 2022 the Canadian author even auctioned off an “unburnable” edition of the novel as an act of protest against the rise in book bans and threats to reproductive rights. Read in the context of today’s global politics, this is a book that may enrage you, but also fire you up to fight back.

This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson
Books with LGBT+ themes are often among the titles seen as unsuitable for school libraries in the US, and British author Dawson’s “manual to all areas of life as an LGBT person” has been one of the most targeted titles. Aimed at teenagers, This Book Is Gay was written with the intention of helping young people coming terms with their sexuality and gender to feel less alone.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s work is a frequent target of book bans, presumably because it addresses racism and slavery head-on, which makes people uncomfortable. But in an increasingly polarised world, we need stories like Beloved, which sheds vital light on racism past and present, more than ever.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
This Pulitzer-winning Holocaust graphic novel has been banned by various US school districts, and was previously banned in Russia. It tells the story of the author’s parents in Nazi concentration camps and his mother’s suicide, depicting Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats. When Spiegelman was chosen to receive an honorary National Book award in the US in 2022, chair of the National Book Foundation’s board of directors David Steinberger said the author’s “masterful” graphic novels have “shown us the limitless possibilities for comics as a literary arts form”.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson
Another book written for a teenage audience (current US book bans tend to affect school libraries), Johnson’s memoir tells the story of the author’s childhood and early adulthood, growing up as both Black and queer. For a young person struggling with some of the same experiences, this book could be transformative.

In Naomi Klein’s most recent book Doppelganger, she talks about Philip Roth quite a lot, which made me realise that though I read quite a lot of Roth as a teenager, I hadn’t read American Pastoral, which is often considered his greatest novel. So I read it and it was great – I had forgotten how funny Roth is.

I also enjoyed Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, a completely different vibe. The short autofictional work is about an affair between the narrator, a divorced mother, and a younger married man, and the obsession and longing and lust that occurs. In the era of Babygirl, the sexual desires of older women are having a something of a cultural moment. Definitely Simple Passion helped me a lot with the fact that I’m passing into a stage of life at a time when a lot of mainstream culture doesn’t really think older women are sexually desirable.

Another book I read recently that I really liked was Nicola Dinan’s Disappoint Me. It follows a trans character who I could identify with a lot, not just because she’s trans but because she decides to pursue quite a heteronormative relationship. As the title indicates, it explores the fundamental point that building a sustainable love for someone involves them disappointing you: eventually, the dreams and expectations that we attach to a person will be somewhat compromised. I think the novel explores that so amazingly.

• Love in Exile by Shon Faye is published by Allen Lane (£18). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.