From the plethora of banned books that have emerged over the last two centuries, one feels that something has changed. It is as if a group of gifted individuals with exceptional abilities suddenly found their voice, questioning topics that until recently were considered taboo.

Writers deemed dangerous and punished by the guardians of the one and only truth – the silence of tyrants. Impudent Russians like Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov, outspoken Irishmen like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, Latin American rebels like Pablo Neruda and Julio Cortázar, South African activists like André Brink and Nadine Gordimer, notorious heretics like Franz Kafka and Salman Rushdie, unrestrained pornographers like D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov, false prophets of the future like Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury, and well-known renegades like Ilias Petropoulos.

Five continents, four types of censorship, three eras, two opposing poles, and a host of writers compose this ingenious puzzle. Art merges with reality in an endless ripple. The lives of the authors seep into their texts, forming different layers of reading, resulting in the sensation that one is reading not just one but many books simultaneously.