I hate the concept of banned books.

I read Fahrenheit 451 when I was about 10 years old. I was reading a few books a week, just like I do today. My parents let me read anything on their shelves, and I read plenty of stuff way out of my age range. I remember reading James Michener’s The Drifters in the Bronx while visiting my mom’s parents, who both passed away when I was in seventh grade.

I find everything about Florida’s House Bill 1467 (2022) to be grotesque. It requires a certified media specialist to select every book in a school library and spells out how books get removed, including when any parent or county resident objects to one. It also requires the Florida Department of Education to publish a list of every book districts removed after an objection and send it to the rest of the state’s school districts “for consideration in their instructional materials selection.”

The 2025-26 list has more than 600 books removed from schools in 10 districts, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the graphic novel of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Robert Heinlein’s Friday. PEN America points out that the list is an undercount, since it only captures books removed after a formal objection. PEN tracked more than 2,000 book bans in Florida in the 2024-25 school year, more than in any other state.

The federal government picked up where Florida left off. After Trump’s January 2025 executive orders, the schools the Department of Defense runs for military families removed at least 596 books. In April 2025, Pete Hegseth’s office had the Naval Academy pull 381 books from its library, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, while West Point and the Air Force Academy were ordered to review their collections.

In October 2025, a federal judge ordered the military family schools’ books returned, finding “improper partisan motivation.” PEN America counted nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools in the 2025-26 school year, the most ever in a single year.

The administration, and fans of the administration, make endless assertions of “free speech” while trying to control and repress speech. I find it infuriating.

I love fiction about bookstores. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was my favorite fiction book of 2013. I also love real bookstores, especially my friend Greeley’s The Composition Shop in Longmont.

Amy and I are in Wanaka, New Zealand, which has a lovely bookshop called The Next Chapter. We browsed in it for a half hour the other day and left with about 20 books, including some by New Zealand writers we didn’t know. When I randomly noticed The Bookshop of Forbidden Books, I added it to the pile.

It was delicious. The book is a soft thriller combined with a light romance, with a strong throughline of government censorship, repression, and the ultimate failure of an ever-increasing autocratic regime when it goes too far and its citizens rise up and say enough. Mitch, a bookseller, goes to prison for five years for selling banned books under a law that, just like Florida’s, is called HB 1467.

This is a perfect book for 2026 in the United States.

Marc Levy is a French novelist who lives in New York City. His first novel, If Only It Were True, came out in 1999 and became the 2005 movie Just Like Heaven with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. His books have been translated into 50 languages and have sold over 50 million copies. When Le Figaro asked the French to rank their favorite authors, Levy tied with Victor Hugo for first place.

The Bookshop of Forbidden Books was first published in French in 2024 as La librairie des livres interdits. Tina Kover’s English translation is excellent.

Levy is a gifted writer who focuses on the characters and their interactions rather than on world building. That was a nice change of pace for me from the deeper world building I regularly get with science fiction. Books are at the center of everything, and Levy’s love of books is woven into several of his protagonists.

At the end of the book, I was introduced to Index on Censorship, which publishes censored writers and artists and monitors threats to free expression around the world. I just became a member.