Why US librarians are on the frontline of the struggle against book bans

American librarian Amanda Jones travels with multiple weapons, has security all around her home, and doesn’t go out in public in her local area. She is one of many librarians to receive aggressive threats over her involvement in the fight against US book bans in Kim A Snyder’s brilliant new documentary on the subject, showing at Sheffield DocFest this weekend, in cinemas in September, and via BBC Storyville later in the year. For this week’s newsletter, I spoke to Snyder about why it’s crucial that UK audiences also see what’s unfolding across the Atlantic.

Plus, scroll for recommendations on books about love and war from Marina Kemp, whose novel The Unwilding came out in paperback this week.

“It didn’t dawn on us that we would come under attack,” says one anonymous librarian at the beginning of Snyder’s 90-minute film. “We just never imagined we would be in the forefront. We’re not supposed to necessarily be seen and felt.” The Librarians zooms in on some of the battlegrounds of book censorship in the US – Texas, Florida, Louisiana – talking to librarians who have lost their jobs and faced threats to their lives for taking a stand against book bans, most of which target stories featuring people of colour and LGBTQ+ characters.

Amanda Jones was awarded 2021 national school librarian of the year before being targeted after she spoke up at a public library board meeting. “You can’t hide. We know where you work and live … you have a LARGE target on your back,” read one online comment.

“I travel with a weapon, multiple weapons,” Jones says, “We have security all round our home. I have escape routes in my head wherever I go. I get groceries delivered. I don’t go out in public in my community, because the things they say online are so horrible.”

Though censorship in the UK is nowhere near the level of that in the US, it still happens: anecdotal evidence suggests requests to remove books are increasing, and the work of US action groups like the well-funded Moms for Liberty has spread. One UK librarian interviewed for a recent study spoke of “finding propaganda from one of these groups left on her desk”, while another “was directly targeted by one of these groups”.

UK audiences should pay attention to the documentary because “there’s nothing that isn’t interdependent now,” says Snyder. While there is “a uniqueness to the brand of book banning and censorship that’s happening in the United States … we’re learning that there are organised efforts, that we export these things, and there’s replication.”

Some UK librarians are “afraid of losing their jobs, much like the ones we know in the States,” she adds. “So I do fear that whether it be here in the UK, or in a much more pronounced way in places like Hungary, this is something to pay attention to, just as any authoritarian tendencies that are taking hold.”

Isobel Hunter, CEO of Libraries Connected, which represents libraries in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the crown dependencies, says: “Thankfully, attempts to have books banned from public libraries remain rare in the UK.

“But it’s important to understand what’s happening in the US, and elsewhere in the world, where librarians have found themselves caught up in divisive public battles often at great personal cost. If we don’t want that to happen here, we must make the case for libraries as places of intellectual discovery and challenge, where anyone can explore new ideas and question old ones.”

The Librarians had its UK premiere on Friday in Sheffield. The documentary shines a “powerful light on how book bans are a fundamental erosion of freedom”, said Gill Furniss, MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough. “This film is a timely reminder that censorship isn’t just a distant threat. It’s a present risk here in the UK, and around the world”.

Snyder says librarians are “reluctant, courageous stewards of our freedom to express and to read” who are “on the frontlines of trying to preserve our democracy right now, and we really want to grow that movement”.

What can be done to push back? “The first thing is knowledge, to be aware of what’s happening in your local library,” says Snyder. “To support your local librarian, to know what’s happening in your school, who makes these decisions in your school.”

I have been knocked out by two very different memoirs about war. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7is made up of many threads: the experience of his father as a PoW in Japan; his own childhood; the lives of his parents and grandparents; Hiroshima; the violent tragedies of colonisation and climate destruction; and finally, towards the book’s end, an account of his near-death as a young man trapped in a kayak in rapids – a passage of such sustained tension and immediacy that I haven’t stopped thinking about it. But more than anything I read this book as a vast and exacting examination of war and human destruction. A Woman in Berlin, meanwhile, documents women’s relationships to war with devastating plainness. The anonymous author, reporting each day of the Russian occupation of Berlin in the spring of 1945, is sharp and funny and stoical.

I think Miriam Toews writes sibling love and loss more powerfully than anyone I’ve read. I can’t bear to say that her small, shapeshifting memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace, “will make you laugh and cry” – but I did laugh out loud, particularly in the truly hilarious letters a younger Toews writes to her fatally depressed sister while backpacking around Europe with a pretentious boyfriend, and I ended the book in tears on the train.

• The Unwilding by Marina Kemp is out in paperback now (4th Estate, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.