Marc Levy is one of the most widely-read living French authors. He has written twenty-eight novels to date. His work has been translated into fifty languages and has sold over fifty million copies worldwide. While his emotionally resonant, very engaging stories can have something of a Marmite effect on certain readers, his mass appeal remains undisputed.
A self-made storyteller, Levy worked for the French Red Cross and ran a computer graphics company before turning to writing in his thirties to entertain his son. His debut novel, If Only It Were True, published twenty-six years ago, was an overnight success. It was later adapted into the Hollywood film Just Like Heaven. Le Figaro newspaper commissioned a nationwide poll asking the French to rank their favourite authors: Marc Levy and Victor Hugo were both ranked first place.
‘To read is to open myself up to the world’
The Bookshop of Forbidden Books is a blend of romance and political satire, and on another level, reads like a cosy crime novel — a genre popularised by contemporary Japanese writers Hisashi Kashiwai, Mai Mochizuki, Magi Inoue among others. It is a light-hearted yet sharp contemporary fable about the power of storytelling, love, and the importance of reading and ideas in the face of modern authoritarianism.
Set in a near-future society where draconian literary censorship laws ban thousands of classic and contemporary books, it serves as an allegory for what critics and political scientists warn could happen if the National Rally or Rassemblement National — the rebranded successor to the Front National — were to win power in France.
The novel’s dark undertow about contemporary literary censorship has actual precedents: in 1995, a newly elected Front National mayor in Orange removed books in the public library about anti-racism and multiculturalism, cancelled left-leaning newspaper subscriptions and stocked shelves with far-right, revisionist literature. Similar purges were carried out in Toulon, Vitrolles, Marignane and other regional towns held by the FN.
‘How could anyone be this afraid of words?’
Michel, known to everyone as Mitch, is a passionate independent bookseller. After buying his shop from an antiques dealer, he opens up the bricked-up cellar hidden beneath the floorboards to discover a secret room with a dusty bar, sofas and tables. There, he hosts secret weekly meetings for students, introducing them to banned masterpieces outlawed under the new House Bill 1467: Stefan Zweig’s Confusion of Feelings; Albert Camus’ The Stranger; Marguerite Duras’ The Lover; Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . . .
One morning, Mitch’s bookshop is raided by the police and he is arrested for secretly stocking and selling forbidden literature. Copies of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Toni Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others are found in the storeroom, and Fahrenheit 451 is used as evidence to convict him. He serves a five-year prison sentence for violating HB 1467 censorship mandates.
The Art of Cooking Mushrooms
Anna works in a local brasserie. When the powerful, lecherous police commissioner Jabert tries to grope and kiss her, she beats off his assault, yet is advised by her boss to act as if ‘nothing had happened’. One month later the police commissioner dies suddenly of food poisoning after dining at the brasserie. Anna vanishes to Canada.
Released from prison, all Mitch wants is to reclaim his freedom, reopen his beloved bookshop and live a peaceful life surrounded by literature. But on his first day of freedom, he runs into Salinas, the prosecutor responsible for sending him to prison. He is overwhelmed by a burning desire for revenge. That same day, he meets Anna who has returned home to open her dream restaurant. Mitch is smitten, but is torn between pursuing retribution against the authoritarian system and the man who ruined five years of his life, and building a new future with Anna.
The Terrible Tyranny of the Majority
Through its blend of dystopian fable and contemporary reality, The Bookshop of Forbidden Books is a bleak reminder of how localised cultural control can quickly escalate into widespread suppression. Ultimately, targeting literature is a calculated tool for political mobilisation: a pattern visible today on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, organisations like PEN America and the American Library Association record thousands of targeted titles annually, executed regionally through state legislation and school board mandates aimed primarily at LGBTQ+ themes, fantasy, or narratives confronting racial injustice.
‘Tyrants don’t need monsters to create a tyrannical state: they just need a system. Minor tasks that in themselves don’t seem objectionable, performed by regular people. Each person carries out their task in order to get paid, or get a bonus or a promotion . . . That’s how authoritarian regimes cement their power: by parcelling out responsibility in such a way that no one realises they’re a link in a chain of atrocities.’ [p 139]
By connecting contemporary American censorship laws (Florida’s HB 1467 or Texas’s HB 900) with France’s own municipal library purges scandal of the mid-1990s, Levy delivers a clear warning: whenever a political movement attempts to enforce ideological purity, independent booksellers, librarians and authors become society’s first line of defence and risk being silenced one way or another.
A moving story that goes far beyond a simple novel, The Bookshop of Forbidden Books is a tribute to freedom of expression and the vital role literature plays in bringing people together.
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