Champaca

Best Sellers from the month of May

Have you read any of our bestsellers yet? Let us know how you enjoyed them.

Available at both our online and offline stores.

Trading comfort for adventure, Shivya Nath chronicles her journey across the planet’s remotest corners—from the Kaluts desert in Iran, to the Cocodrilo coral reefs of Cuba—ROOTLESS AND RESTLESS, is an endearing account of a slow travel-hunt, for stories, traditions and meaning in the age of social media and climate change.

Shape-shifting construction workers, a nurse stitching together bodies fallen from unfinished skyscrapers and other nightmarishly Kafkaesquean settings populate Deepak Unnikrishnan’s stunning debut, TEMPORARY PEOPLE. Narrated across 27 chapters, this novel of ideas foretells the surreal reality of Malayali guest-workers in the UAE like no other.

THE GOOD REPORTER: A MEMOIR OF JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY complicates the boundary between the objective journalist and the deeply human observer. Written by Disha Mullick and the collective team behind Khabar Lahariya, this striking anti-memoir turns the camera inward on the reporters who brave India’s most volatile rural beats. Navigating the harrowing aftermath of a stone quarry tragedy, a reporter’s professional presence fractures, unearthing buried personal trauma and profound grief. Moving beyond traditional narratives of journalistic triumph over hardship, this book is a literary exploration of what happens when the pursuit of truth demands exposing your own hidden scars.

DHOOP ISSUE 4 explores hyper-locality through food—its local commons, cultures, and discourse. Blending photo essays, micro-histories, and personal narratives, this issue offers an intimate look at the mini-eateries, plating aesthetics, and the laborious ingredient lifecycles that define the registers of local cuisines, recipes and taste across Manipur, Kerala, Karnataka and several other places.

Sarnath Banerjee’s sixth graphic novel ABSOLUTE JAFAR set across Delhi, Karachi and Berlin follows Brigu Sen and his family through immigration, bureaucracy and the anxieties of everyday life. Blending memoir, reportage and fiction, the book draws on folk mytholog

Here is what we have lined up in June!

📚 6 June | Book Tasting: Stories and Flavours from Northeast India: writing from the Northeast, paired with a meal from the region, course by course.

📚 13 June | Fudge Won’t Budge: a read-aloud with Riddhi Maniar Doda, followed by a puppet-making activity. For ages 3–6.

📚 13 June | The Small and the Infinite: a gouache workshop with Ragha, where poems by Whitman, Mary Oliver, and Ruskin Bond are the starting point.

📚 20 June | Drawing Expressions in a Fun and Simple Way: Bhavana on sketching human expressions, with characters from The Treasure Seekers: An Otherworldly Quest as reference. For ages 8+.

📚 27 June | Wild in the Capital: Neha Sinha and Rituparna Sarkar on finding and recording the natural world in the middle of a city.

Register through the link in our bio.

May brought us stories, conversations, questions, laughter, and many moments of gathering around books.

From author conversations and book discussions to workshops and reading groups, our spaces were filled with people coming together to read, listen, learn, and connect.

Thank you to everyone who spent time with us this month. These discussions are shaped as much by the people in the room as by the books at their centre.

As we look back on a memorable May, we’re also looking forward to an exciting June at Champaca. We welcome everyone who loves books, conversations, ideas, and the joy of gathering around stories to join us for another month of books at the centre of events, discussions, and community.

The Complex: Book Launch with Karan Mahajan and Dharini Bhaskar

Champaca x SkilLit Readers: Summer Programme

Rootless and Restless: Book Launch with Shivya Nath and Vasanthi Hariprakash

Preview of Dhoop 4

It Started with a Yawn: Illustration workshop with Shubhshree Mathur

Champaca x Vaaka Media: Boys & Girls- Love, Books and Love Aaj Kal

Sweet Excess: Book discussion with Ish*ta Dey and Elizabeth Yorke

I Love My Amma: Book Discussion with Vasudhendra, Narayan Shankaran and Roopa Pai

Perfect the Way You Are: Read-aloud with Niyatee Sharma

Hello and welcome to the Champaca Reading Challenge!

For 2026, we’ve got twelve prompts for you - one for each month. The third prompt for the year is 👇

By José Saramago, Toni Morrison, or Eunice de Souza

José Saramago was a Portuguese writer and Nobel Laureate whose novels often begin with a simple premise and unfold into questions about identity, memory, power, and society. If you’re reading him for the first time, THE DOUBLE is a good place to start, but you could just as easily begin with ALL THE NAMES, BLINDNESS, or THE CAVE.
On our shelves:
ALL THE NAMES
BLINDNESS
THE CAVE
THE DOUBLE

Toni Morrison’s novels remain essential reading for anyone interested in family, history, race, memory, and the stories nations tell themselves. BELOVED is often where readers begin, but each of her books opens a different door into her work.
On our shelves:
BELOVED
PARADISE
SONG OF SOLOMON
SULA
TAR BABY
THE BLUEST EYE

Eunice de Souza was one of India’s most distinctive poetic voices. Her writing looks closely at family, gender, selfhood, faith, and everyday life, often with wit and precision. VOLCANO brings together decades of her poetry, while her other books offer different ways into her work.
On our shelves:
A NECKLACE OF SKULLS
DANGERLOK
VOLCANO: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EUNICE DE SOUZA

Whether you’re revisiting a favourite or reading one of these writers for the first time, we’d love to know where you’re starting. Remember to use the hashtag when you post on social media, and let us know what you’re reading.

Head over to the link in our bio to shop!📚

Dear readers,

The NLF Reading Challenge is here, and many of the books on its list are books you can already find at Champaca. A stack of stories to help young readers begin, continue, and enjoy their reading journey this summer.

The Neev Literature Festival is a two day celebration of children’s books, with author sessions, performances, and workshops for readers of all ages, and the NLF Reading Challenge invites children to read more, reflect on their books, and meet authors.

If you are following the challenge, or would like to read along, you can find these titles at our stores in Vasanth Nagar and Indiranagar, or browse them online on our website, and take them home for a summer of stories.

What if you could taste a book before reading it.

Book Tasting is an evening where food and literature come together. This edition travels to Northeast India — fiction that questions borders, poetry that carries grief alongside wit, essays that reshape how we understand memory and land. Each course paired with a short reading, followed by conversation.

The menu, curated by Roots & Ferns, brings together flavours from Manipur and Nagaland.

Come with an appetite. Leave with a reading list.

Here are all the event details:

Date: 6 June, Saturday
Time: 6:30 PM onwards
Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar

Seating is limited. Register through the link in our bio.

Natalia Ginzburg wrote about families, speech, memory, politics, and the forms of ordinary life with rare exactness. Born in Palermo in 1916, she became one of the essential Italian writers of the twentieth century, and her work still feels close to the nerve of how people live with one another.

We have been thinking about the world of her books for a while now: the mothers and daughters, the sons who leave, the houses full of repeated phrases, the small humiliations, the jokes, the grief, the long shadow of history. These are books that seem quiet until you notice how much they contain.

If you are reading Ginzburg for the first time, this post is a small way in. If you have read her before, you may know the feeling already: a page that looks simple, and then leaves you altered.

Drop by our stores in Vasanthnagar or Indiranagar to browse these books in person, or find them on our website.