National Book Award Finalist.

At all times, we must stay on the surface of language. The surface! Beware of wading into meaning. Do you know what happens to people who sink into meaning?An eternal mania strangles them and they're left unfit to live. You are a guardian of surfaces. The future of humanity depends on you.

T H E  F I R S T  C E N S O R




The new book censor has not 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, pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter, and the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams. 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.




Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Guardian of Surfaces is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

Translated by: Ranya Abdelrahman, Sawad Hussain