Oct 15, 20262:22 PM

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Once bookshops in the United Kingdom run out of whatever stock they currently have of the novels of Sally Rooney, one of this century’s most beloved and celebrated authors (Normal People, Conversations With Friends), there will be no more. On Wednesday, news broke that Faber & Faber, Rooney’s U.K. publisher, will no longer be publishing the Irish novelist’s books in the U.K. market, because they are unable to pass on royalty payments from those book sales to Rooney without breaking anti-terrorism laws.

Sounds insane, doesn’t it? How did we get here? What does selling books have to do with terrorism? Let us dive into one of the stickiest and most sinister loads of nonsense the U.K. government has gotten us into in recent years.

So, sorry—Sally Rooney is funding terrorism?

If you ask the British government, yes. Back in August of 2025, she pledged to give royalty payments from her books and other creative projects to a U.K.-based group called Palestine Action, which has the stated aim of “ending global complicity with Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime.” There’s a section in Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 that makes it an offense punishable by a maximum prison term of 14 years if someone, or a company, “provides money or other property, and knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism.” Ergo, if Faber pays Rooney those royalties, and she gives them to Palestine Action, that would count as funding a terrorist group. She canceled a trip to the U.K. to accept an award last year because of the risk of her getting arrested once she stepped on British soil.

Who precisely are Palestine Action? Why are they considered a terrorist group?

Palestine Action, a direct-action group, was set up in the U.K. in 2020, and its activities have focused on break-ins and property damage at factories belonging to Israeli weapons manufacturers. The U.K. government proscribed the group as a terrorist organization in July of 2025, which seems to have been prompted by them breaking into a Royal Air Force base to spray-paint military aircraft the previous month. This now makes membership and support of the group an offense at the same level as it would be to join or support al-Qaida or ISIS. The proscription has been unpopular in the U.K. and has led to repeated protests at which peaceful elderly and disabled people have been dragged away by police for holding signs saying, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” There have been more than 700 arrests of protesters related to the Palestine Action ban, almost all of whom were just holding banners.

Terrorism seems like a strong word for what these guys are doing.

Correct! This designation is pretty widely regarded here as a disturbing misuse of anti-terrorism laws. Palestine Action, ISIS, and al-Qaida … one of these things is not like the others.

What’s Rooney’s dog in this fight?

She’s been a vocal supporter of Palestine for a long time, at least in part because Irish–Palestinian solidarity has always been strong due to their shared history of colonial oppression. Her decision to announce that she was going to donate royalties to Palestine Action in particular wasn’t just about supporting Palestine but about deliberately doing something that the U.K. government had decided was illegal in order to challenge their overreach in banning a protest group.

And Faber has decided to abandon Rooney?!

Far from it, I think. Faber and Rooney both released statements Wednesday explaining that the decision had been reached jointly, and it seems much more likely that this is an agreed-on strategy to protect both parties legally, but more importantly, to get eyeballs back on how untenable the U.K. government’s legislation is. They can’t outright say that, but I would bet any money that that’s what’s happening. And speaking of money, this is no small-potatoes move for Faber: In years when Rooney has a new paperback or hardback out, sales of her books reportedly account for something like 10 percent of the company’s income, she’s so popular. It seems unlikely that law enforcement in the U.K. would actually try to arrest Rooney if she came to the country, so vastly unpopular would that move be, but it highlights the absurdity of the law for Rooney and Faber to say plainly that this is what the law states should happen.

I can still buy Rooney’s books outside of the U.K., right? 

Sure. Faber will be providing them in Ireland and Commonwealth countries, and she’s with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S., and Penguin Random House in a bunch of other places. This decision only applies to the U.K. market.

Why is this happening now?

The timing of the announcement is part of what makes it seem obvious that Faber has not decided to just cut Rooney loose out of cowardice about her political beliefs. Palestine Action tried to have the ban against it overturned first in the U.K.’s high court in February. The court found the ban disproportionate, but the government then appealed to a higher court, the Court of Appeal, which upheld the proscription in June. Next month, the case will be heard on appeal again in the even-higher-up Supreme Court, and so Faber and Rooney making this announcement now brings the whole thing back into the public eye.

Why is Prime Minister Andy Burnham trying to fight to keep the ban, especially when he’s leader of the Labour Party?

Good question, and one that Faber and Rooney no doubt would like people to be asking. It is not at all a good look for the U.K. government to be effectively censoring what books can and can’t be published here because of the author’s political beliefs. I would imagine also that the last thing a left-leaning leader literally named “Burnham” wants to do is get tarred by the book-burning brush. It’s also, of course, not even necessary for Palestine Action to be classed as a terrorist organisation for legal action to be brought against protesters for things like damage to property and bodily harm, if that’s the ostensible aim of the designation. But now that the insane move has been taken to proscribe Palestine Action, to un-proscribe them is a huge can of worms, as it will prompt accusations of antisemitism, however misguided. That’s a very delicate matter here in the U.K. in general, going back long before Oct. 7 to Labour Party scandals around the question of whether speaking out against Zionism was anti-Jewish.

So Burnham is just carrying on the previous government’s spinelessness on Gaza?

Kind of, and kind of not. He issued a formal apology for Keir Starmer’s slowness in calling for a Gaza ceasefire right before he became the PM, saying, “Labour’s initial response to the treatment of Gaza caused huge hurt. We got it wrong and I am sorry for that.” What he’s not done, though, is call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, nor has he shown any signs of wanting to un-proscribe Palestine Action.

What’s going to happen next then? A black market for under-the-counter paperbacks of Normal People in Britain?

I guess so, unless the Supreme Court case next month rules in favor of Palestine Action, and unless the government does the right thing—indeed the thing that U.K. governments love to do anyway—and rows this all back and pretends the whole embarrassing affair never happened.