About Champaca: We are writing to you from Champaca Bookstore, an independent, women-run bookstore and children's library in Bangalore. At Champaca, we curate our books and events to enable the discovery of diverse narratives. We are a community of readers. We have experienced the world differently thanks to the stories we've read and shared—they enrich us like nothing else, and we’re excited to share that with you! Until you can make it to our much-loved, quiet, green space in Bangalore, we can bring the books to you—we ship across India.
This February at Champaca, we were heartbroken—as was most of the book world—by the announcement of the closure of Westland. In a couple of months all books published by Westland that are not stocked by bookstores, such as Champaca, or bought by readers, like you, may become unavailable. We’ve got as many copies of the Westland books we love as a small independent bookstore like ours can, so you can have access to them for longer. You can find them here.
We’ve had the opportunity this month to put together some lovely author events that you can catch online. Bryan Karetnyk talked to Sumana Mukherjee about his new translation of ‘The Village of Eight Graves’ by Seishi Yokomizo. A wonderful panel of people who contributed to the anthology ‘Cat People’—including Devapriya Roy, Varun Grover, and Aditi Sriram—discussed their love of cats.
If you’re looking for a book club to participate in, why not join us in our Champaca Book Subscription? We send you a book every month, and meet up at the end of each month to discuss it. We’ve been joined in these meetings by authors and translators, like Srinath Perur (author of ‘If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai’) and Taran N Khan (author of ‘Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul’). It’s been lovely to host these warm, intimate conversations among book-lovers, and we’d love to have you there too. Learn more here.
If you’re in Bangalore, our leafy, verdant, book-filled store in Bangalore is open from 10:30 am to 6:00 pm, so come by and spend a quiet afternoon with us, and take home a book haul!
You can find us and our book recommendations on our website, Instagram, and Twitter.