Freedom & Resistance

Voices of resistance, liberation, and the fight for justice.

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Against the Loveless World

Against the Loveless World

Against the Loveless World follows Nahr, a Palestinian woman whose life is shaped by displacement, political conflict, and the struggle for independence. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugee parents, she dreams of finding love, raising a family, and building a stable future. Instead, a series of betrayals and difficult circumstances leads her through different countries in the Middle East, where she encounters exploitation, prejudice, and political upheaval. As the story unfolds through memories narrated from solitary confinement, Nahr reveals the experiences that shaped her transformation from a vulnerable young woman into someone determined to resist the forces controlling her life. Abulhawa explores the intersection of personal freedom and political oppression, examining how gender, exile, and economic hardship influence women’s choices. The novel is a powerful portrait of survival and the determination to claim dignity in an unjust world.

Dancing in the Mosque

Dancing in the Mosque

Dancing in the Mosque is a memoir written as a letter from Homeira Qaderi to her young son, whom she was forced to leave behind after a painful separation. Growing up in Afghanistan during decades of political upheaval, Qaderi discovers the power of education and writing as ways to resist the restrictions imposed on girls and women. Despite the dangers surrounding her, she pursues her education and becomes a writer, determined to preserve her independence and give voice to women’s experiences. Later, under Taliban rule, her personal freedom becomes increasingly limited, and motherhood places her in an agonising position. Through intimate reflections on love, loss, and resistance, Qaderi recounts the sacrifices she makes to remain true to herself while navigating a society that seeks to control women’s lives. The memoir is a powerful exploration of maternal love, personal courage, and the cost of freedom.

Afghanistan 2020

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Saidiya V. Hartman

At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

United States 2020

Cantoras

Carolina De Robertis

Set in Uruguay during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, Cantoras follows five women who find one another in a society where political dissent is brutally suppressed and homosexuality is criminalized through social persecution. Romina, Flaca, Anita, Paz, and Malena discover a remote coastal village where they can escape judgment and explore their identities, relationships, and desires. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives intertwine as they navigate love, family expectations, political repression, and personal transformation. Through their enduring friendships and shared sanctuary, Carolina De Robertis explores queer identity, chosen family, and the courage required to live authentically under oppressive circumstances. The novel is a powerful celebration of resilience, solidarity, and the freedom to define one’s own life.

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro

Sicily, 1960s. Fifteen-year-old Oliva Denaro loves running through the countryside and dreams of a life beyond the strict rules imposed on girls. But when a local boy decides he wants her, Oliva discovers how little control a young woman has over her own future in a society ruled by tradition and shame. Inspired by a true story, this moving novel follows Oliva’s courageous struggle to reclaim her freedom in a world that expects women to remain silent. Through her determination, Viola Ardone explores the cost of defiance and the extraordinary strength it takes to say no when everyone expects you to obey.

Beasts of a Little Land

Beasts of a Little Land

In 1917, Korea is under Japanese colonial rule, and the lives of its people are shaped by poverty, violence, and the struggle for independence. When ten-year-old Jade is sold by her desperate family to a courtesan school in Pyongyang, she enters a world where survival depends on learning to navigate rigid social hierarchies. After fleeing to Seoul, she meets JungHo, an orphan boy struggling to survive on the streets. Their bond becomes a defining force in both their lives, even as their paths diverge and JungHo becomes involved in the resistance movement. Spanning five decades, from the final years of the Korean Empire through colonial occupation and the upheavals of the twentieth century, this sweeping historical novel follows a cast of interconnected characters whose destinies are shaped by love, ambition, betrayal, and political turmoil. Moving between courtesan houses, bustling cities, and battle-scarred forests, the story explores what it means to fight for personal dignity and national freedom when the world seems determined to take both away.

South Korea 2021

Book Censor's Library

Book Censor's Library

Bothayna Al-Essa

The Book Censor’s Library presents a dystopian world in which literature is treated as a threat and citizens are expected to follow an officially approved version of reality. The protagonist works as a book censor, examining manuscripts and identifying ideas that might undermine the established order. His work initially appears to be a straightforward responsibility, but his encounters with the books he must judge gradually complicate his understanding of truth, authority, and individual thought. As he becomes increasingly aware of the power of stories, he begins questioning the system he serves and the assumptions that have shaped his life. Al-Essa uses satire and speculative fiction to explore censorship, propaganda, and the relationship between literature and political power. The novel celebrates the freedom to read, imagine, and question, suggesting that controlling stories is also a way of controlling how people understand themselves and the world around them.

No Honour

No Honour follows sixteen-year-old Abida, who lives in a small Pakistani village governed by strict traditions and expectations surrounding family honour. Determined to choose whom she loves and build a life of her own, Abida challenges the conventions that control women’s lives. When her choices place her in grave danger, she escapes to Lahore with the help of her devoted father, Jamil, who risks everything to protect her. As Jamil searches for his missing daughter, both are drawn into a world where the threats facing vulnerable women extend far beyond their village. Moving between rural Pakistan and the crowded streets of Lahore, Awais Khan explores the devastating consequences of honour-based violence, forced conformity, and gender inequality. The novel also examines the complicated relationship between parents and children, particularly the courage required to challenge deeply rooted cultural expectations. Through Abida’s struggle for survival and independence, No Honour becomes a powerful story about love, resilience, and the right to determine one’s own future.

Dawn

On a hot night in Adana, southern Turkey, a gathering of friends is interrupted when police storm into a private home and arrest those suspected of opposing the government. Among them is Oya, a journalist recently released from prison and forced into exile for her left-wing political beliefs. As the detainees are interrogated, their stories unfold, revealing the fear, compromises, and quiet acts of resistance that define life under military repression. Through the experiences of workers, intellectuals, women, and even the officials enforcing the law, Sevgi Soysal exposes a society where power can turn ordinary people into both victims and perpetrators. Yet darkness does not extinguish every possibility of solidarity. With sharp humour and an unsentimental eye, Soysal explores how people preserve their dignity when their freedom is threatened. Inspired by her own experience of political imprisonment, Dawn is a powerful portrait of resistance, gender inequality, and the fragile hope that survives even in the most oppressive circumstances.

The Last Days of Terranova

The Last Days of Terranova

What if a bookstore could preserve everything the world is trying to forget? In 2014, Vicenzo Fontana faces the imminent closure of Terranova, his family’s beloved bookstore, threatened by property developers after decades of serving as a refuge for dissidents, exiles, and forbidden books. Spending one final night among its shelves, the elderly bookseller revisits the people and events that shaped his life and the history of the shop. His memories lead back to 1935, when his father first opened Terranova, and forward through the Spanish Civil War’s legacy, Franco’s dictatorship, and the turbulent years of political resistance. Among the bookstore’s visitors are idealists, rebels, writers, and people fleeing persecution, each carrying a story of their own. Blending literary allusions, political history, and poetic storytelling, Manuel Rivas creates a moving tribute to books as vessels of memory and instruments of resistance. As Terranova faces its final hours, the novel asks what we lose when the places that protect ideas and shelter outsiders disappear.

Cautery

Lucía Lijtmaer

A woman in Barcelona is trapped in a relationship that looks perfect from the outside, yet she cannot shake the feeling that her life is quietly falling apart. Haunted by fantasies of an impending apocalypse, she begins to question the promises of romantic love, modern feminism, and the freedom she thought she had achieved. Four centuries earlier, Deborah Moody, a fiercely independent Englishwoman, escapes to colonial America after losing almost everything. Despite their vastly different worlds, both women confront the same uncomfortable truth: independence does not guarantee freedom from the expectations and disappointments imposed by men. Darkly funny, provocative, and sharply observant, Cautery explores heartbreak, female anger, and the radical possibility of starting over when the life you’ve built becomes unbearable.

Yñiga

Yñiga Calinauan leads a quiet, unremarkable life in Manila until a retired army general accused of murdering peasants and political activists is arrested across the street from her home. Days later, her neighbourhood is burned to the ground, in what some suspect is retaliation. Forced to flee, Yñiga returns to M—, the small fishing town where she grew up, hoping to recover the peaceful existence she has lost. But the violence she thought she had escaped follows her, drawing her into a history of political repression and family trauma that she can no longer ignore. As the boundaries between her past and present begin to collapse, Yñiga must confront the legacy of her activist father, who disappeared years earlier, and the unresolved wounds that continue to shape her family. Blending political thriller, dark humour, and literary fiction, Glenn Diaz’s novel examines the enduring consequences of state violence in the Philippines. Against a landscape haunted by disappearances and historical injustice, it explores the possibility of resistance—not only through dramatic acts of rebellion, but also through the determination to remember, endure, and refuse silence.

Philippines 2022

About this theme

Books: 107
Countries: 45

Countries with this theme

Central African Republic

Dominican Republic