As a certified book girlie, I am obsessed with Dua Lipa. Back in June 2023, the singer launched a book club as part of her Service95 platform, and now three years later, she has her own library in the famous bookstore Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal. The library, which is called the Manifesto Library, has 100 books on its shelves that were once banned or controversial.
And in case you don’t immediately get it: That’s kind of a big deal. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
Why is Dua Lipa’s library in Portugal so special?
Though Dua has been booked and busy as of late, she’s still just as committed to promoting reading. She does this with her international Service95 Book Club but also through her own channels. Most recently, Dua’s book club announced that she curated her own library in collaboration with Livraria Lello.
Sounds cool, but it’s not just a few of Dua’s favorite beach reads. In the announcement post on Instagram, it’s explained how the Manifesto Library “is a space dedicated to books that challenge power, resist censorship, and amplify the voices that others seek to silence.”
Which books are in Dua Lipa’s library?
In total, there are 100 books on the shelves of Dua’s Isd around four key themes: power, control, voice, and memory. All of the titles were once banned or censored, but in Dua’s library, they’re all now celebrated.
Here is the complete list of titles that you’ll find Born a Crimerary:
- A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare
- A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
- A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
- Ai Weiwei on Censorship by Ai Weiwei
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Another Country by James Baldwin
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Blindness by José Saramago
- Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams
- Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
- Erasure by Percival Everett
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Free by Lea Ypi
- Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
- Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
- Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke
- Heartstopper by Alice Oseman
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk
- Jerusalem by Gonçalo M. Tavares
- Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis
- Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina
- Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
- Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
- My Friends by Hisham Matar
- My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird by Afghan Women
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
- Oblivion: A Memoir by Héctor Abad Faciolince
- Olhos d’Água by Conceição Evaristo
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El-Akkad
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
- Patriot by Alexei Navalny
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
- Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya
- Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
- Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
- Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jędrowski
- That Hair by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
- The Accusation by Bandi
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
- The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler
- The Machine to Make Spaniards by Valter Hugo Mãe
- The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
- The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
- The Murmuring Coast by Lídia Jorge
- The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
- The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- The Vegetarian by Han Kang
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- There There by Tommy Orange
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act by Joshua Wong and Jason Y. Ng
- We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai
- We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey
- Wild Swans by Jung Chang












