Banned Books Week launches in the UK on 25 September and is a celebration of the freedom to read. It was originally launched in America in 1982 as a reflection on the rise in challenges faced by libraries, bookstores and schools regarding the content of books. To date, more than a thousand titles have been challenged. Banned Books Week encourages customers to read and examine the identified texts and encourages individual views and opinions. Several libraries in the UK have chosen a selection of titles which have been previously banned.
City Library will be displaying a collection of these texts which fall into this category or you can reserve a title via our Online Catalogue.
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| All Quiet On the Western Front | Erich Remarque |
| American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis |
| And Tango Makes Three | Juston Richardson |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| Black Beauty | Anna Sewell |
| Blankets | Craig Thompson |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| Catch 22 | Joseph Heller |
| A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| The Communist Manifesto | Marx and Engels |
| The Country Girls | Edna O’Brien |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown |
| Death Note 1 | Tsugumi Ohba |
| The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank |
| For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemmingway |
| Forever | Judy Blume |
| Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic | Alison Bechdel |
| Go Tell It On The Mountain | James Baldwin |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| The Gulf Between Us | Geraldine Bedell |
| The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | J K Rowling |
| I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou |
| Interventions | Noam Chomsky |
| July’s People | Nadine Gordimer |
| Lady Chatterley’s Lover | D H Lawrence |
| Last Exit to Brooklyn | Hubert Selby |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| Lysistrata | Aristophanes |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov |
| Naked Lunch | William Burroughs |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell |
| Not Without My Daughter | Betty Mahmoody |
| One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
| The Origin of Species | Charles Darwin |
| The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Stephen Chbosky |
| Persepolis | Marjan Satrapi |
| A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving |
| The Proof of the Honey | Salwa al-Neimi |
| The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie |
| Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Spoils of War | John Tirman |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Milan Kundera |
| We | Yevgeny Zamyatin |
| The Well of Loneliness | Radclyffe Hall |
| Wild Pigeon | Nurmuhemmet Yasin |
| The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | Frank L Baum |