Dua Lipa is saving books and slaying looks in her most recent Instagram drops. The first post in question is another classic Lipa luxury travel carousel showcasing her Italian honeymoon with her new husband, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them actor Callum Turner. Among the highlights is a candid snap of her micr-bikini that, as InStyle points out, seems to take inspiration from a strawberry-lemon sorbet.
Others sure to pause your side swipes are a bubble bath snap from an especially opulent stone jacuzzi, another bikini-clad image captured from the sundeck of a yacht, and various other lovely snaps of her and Turner’s epicurean adventures.
The “Training Season” singer’s most recent post, though, is truly newsworthy. Her Service95 Book Club—a part of her Service95 media platform—has partnered with famed Portuguese bookshop Livraria Lello to start a library dedicated to banned literature.
“Livraria Lello has been a source of inspiration for over a century,” Lipa says in an Instagram video. “Dreamers, radicals and artists have passed through these doors. Works of activism, reimagining, and dissent have found a home on these shelves. There is no more fitting place for the Manifesto Library to live.”
Lipa continues to describe the 100 books included across four categories: power, control, voice, and memory.
“You’re probably not surprised to hear that George Orwell’s Animal Farm was considered anti-communist propaganda and banned in the USSR by Stalin. But maybe you are more surprised to learn that 1984 was considered pro-communist and banned by a parents group in 1981 in Jackson, Florida.”
“A book removed from a shelf becomes a decision about the questions that are asked, whose stories are carried forward, and which lives are believed to be worth understanding,” she says in closing. “So take your time, look closely and decide for yourself what belongs on these shelves.”
A post on the Service95 website delves deeper into each category:
Power examines who holds influence, who challenges it and who gets to define the narratives we inherit. The section includes The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Free by Lea Ypi, Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Control maps the mechanisms through which freedom of thought is constrained: surveillance, propaganda, ideology and the quieter instruments of institutional pressure. On these shelves: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Trial by Franz Kafka, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, and Ai Weiwei on Censorship by the artist and activist whose exhibition A4 is currently showing at Livraria Lello.
Voice amplifies perspectives that have been systematically excluded or overlooked. The section features The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and My Pen Is The Wing Of A Bird: New Fiction By Afghan Women.
Memory examines the relationship between history and erasure. These books preserve personal and collective testimony in the face of deliberate forgetting, particularly across contexts of war, dictatorship, exile and injustice. Among them: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Patriot by Alexei Navalny, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera, and The Books Of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.
The opening date is forthcoming, but feel free to check in on Service95’s website for more updates.