Welcome to Community Recommends, a new Souk series where we ask fellow enthusiasts to share the things they love. Books, objects, places, ideas. The goal is simple: instead of algorithms or bestseller lists, we turn to our community for discovery.

For our very first edition, we’ve teamed up with Champaca, the beloved women-run independent bookstore and café in Bengaluru, to recommend 9 books—across memoir, fiction, criticism, history, and poetry—that look closely at how women live, think, write and move through the world.

Some of these books challenge age-old scientific biases around gender and sex. Others present a capsule of women’s writing in India over the past two millennia. Some ruminate on the enduring nature of female friendships, while others reimagine history and modern-day society. Together, they offer many ways of reading women’s lives, across time, place and language.

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Rs. 499 / SHRAYANA BHATTACHARYA	HOME & LIVING  01 Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women And The Search For Intimacy And Independence  King Khan becomes a conduit in Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, as economist Shrayana Bhattacharya speaks to women across class, caste and language backgrounds to explore how work, romance, aspiration and popular culture intersect in post-liberalisation India. She presents the act of following Shah Rukh Khan as an act of rebellion; his films and public persona become a powerful lens through which the author examines ideas of longing, companionship and the search for autonomy among Indian women. The book listens closely to women’s interior lives, and treats ideas of fandom and everyday desire seriously.
HOME & LIVING 02 Unbound: 2,000 Years Of Indian Women’s Writing Unbound is an important collection of women’s writing in India, edited by author and award-winning novelist Annie Zaidi. The anthology gathers writing by Indian women across two millennia—poetry, essays, fiction and more—offering a sense of the scale and diversity of women’s voices in the subcontinent. With passion, bravery and wit, Unbound presents glimpses of a formidable literary tradition in India, placing contemporary conversations around gender and womanhood within a much larger context. It’s a powerful reminder that women have always written about and influenced the intellectual landscape of this region. (The INR 499 edition is currently available.)	Rs. 399 / ANNIE ZAIDI
Rs. 595 / ROMILA THAPAR, KUMKUM ROY, PREETI GULATI	HOME & LIVING 03 Women Writing History: Three Generations Three eminent historians, Romila Thapar, Kumkum Roy and Preeti Gulati, reflect on their lives in academia and the changing landscape of historical scholarship in India in Women Writing History. The book emphasises how feminist perspectives are critical to the effective functioning of institutions, and can expand the kinds of stories that are considered historically significant. It foregrounds women not just as subjects of history, but as its interpreters and knowledge-makers.
HOME & LIVING 04 A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk  A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk examines, with an unflinching honesty, the early months of motherhood: the periods of exhaustion, tenderness, alienation and love. Rather than recycling comforting myths, the book acknowledges the disorientation that often accompanies caring for a newborn, while recognising the emotional and political weight of that labour. What emerges is a portrait of motherhood that allows contradiction and complexity to exist side by side. (The INR 1,099 edition is currently in stock.)	Rs.  1,099 / RACHEL CUSK
Rs.  350 / TARAN N. KHAN	HOME & LIVING 05 Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul  In this memoir, Journalist Taran N. Khan traces Kabul on foot, free from the burden of headlines. Unhurried walks, conversations with locals, and her own experiences in the city over a period of seven years allow Khan to understand the natural rhythms of a lively city. It’s an antidote to the accounts of conflict regions penned by international journalists, where big, flashy geopolitical manoeuvres take centre stage. Instead, Khan engages with the city, walking into bookshops and cafes, striking up friendships, and exploring the many neighbourhoods. Her account presents a far more layered reality than the one often presented in global news coverage. Thus, Shadow City is an intimate portrait of a city experienced through movement, memory and everyday life.
HOME & LIVING 06 Assassin Satyapriya, a middle-aged woman living alone in a big city, is attacked one night. Soon, she learns that this was no random attack; indeed, it’s part of an orchestrated series of attempts to kill her. K.R. Meera’s contemporary novel (originally published in Malayalam as Ghathakan) interrogates gender, caste and state violence, in this complex and richly crafted critique of modern society. It’s a striking work that places individual experience within the larger structures shaping it.	Rs.699 / K. R. MEERA
Rs. 650 / ELENA FERRANTE	HOME & LIVING 07 My Brilliant Friend This much loved and critically lauded novel, by pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, takes us through the story of Elena and her “brilliant friend”, Lila, two girls growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Naples in the ’50s. It follows the complicated, enduring bond between them as their lives diverge over time. With flair and insight, Ferrante treats female friendship as a force that can shape identity and possibility; even as ambition, personal rivalry, education and class mobility threaten to disrupt these strong connections, the bond persists. Few novels capture the intensity and influence of friendships between women quite like this one.
HOME & LIVING 08 Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, And the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story An important, much needed book challenging long-held scientific biases, by acclaimed science journalist Angela Saini. Do boys prefer playing with cars instead of dolls? Are women naturally prone to ‘nurturing’? Centuries of bias and, indeed, sexist assumptions, have shaped scientific research on sex and gender. In Inferior, Saini sets about dismantling these dated notions through a meticulous examination of the research available on the subject. Moving through biology, neuroscience and anthropology, she reveals how flawed assumptions about women’s bodies have influenced everything from medical studies to evolutionary theory. It’s a sharp and accessible look at how feminist inquiry can reimagine the way science understands gender.	Rs.  699 / ANGELA SAINI
Rs. 599 / ELENA FERRANTE	HOME & LIVING 09 The Lost Daughter Another captivating Ferrante novel, The Lost Daughter, published in 2006, places us alongside Leda, a middle-aged academic who decides to spend her summer holidays alone, renting a penthouse and spending time at the beach. Soon enough, though, her quiet seaside holiday transforms into a confrontation with her past as a mother; Leda comes across a young mother and daughter duo, and begins to ruminate on her own journey through motherhood. Ferrante explores maternal ambivalence, desire, regret—through memory and small unsettling moments—without trying to resolve them neatly. The novel lingers in the uncomfortable, complicated emotional terrain that motherhood can occupy.