Events
Chapters hosts an evolving programme of gatherings that celebrate reading, conversation and community. Our events are intimate in scale and international in spirit. We bring together writers, thinkers and neighbours in a space designed for curiosity and connection.
From quiet communal reading hours to book clubs shaped by our themes, from creative writing courses to conversations with authors from Berlin and beyond, each event reflects our belief that literature thrives when people come together. Some gatherings are lively while others are reflective. All are rooted in generosity, discovery and dialogue.
Join us, take a seat and be part of the conversation.
Romantic & Ruinous Book Club
Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s one of the best at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing… Girlie’s type.
RSVP Essential — bookshop@chaptersberlin.com
Practice & Purpose
Nikki Trott has spent her career asking a question most business culture actively avoids: what if work was designed around life, rather than in spite of it? As founder of Sacara and author of Sacred Business, she has developed a framework that refuses the false choice between ambition and meaning, weaving strategic thinking with a deeper attentiveness to the earth, to community, to what we actually want to build.
This evening is for founders, freelancers, and anyone building something (a business, a practice, a career) who has felt the tension between how they work and how they want to live.
Nikki will share the core principles of Sacred Business, and together we will explore what it looks like in practice to reconnect commercial life with something larger than profit. There will be space for questions, and the evening closes with a book signing.
Email us to RSVP: bookshop@chaptersberlin.com
DESIRE & DISCOVERY
An Evening with Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
There are writers who change the conversation, and then there are writers who prove the conversation was always happening, just without us.
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah's The Sex Lives of African Women became exactly what it deserved to be: an instant classic, lauded by Publishers Weekly as an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation and named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist. Her new book, Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals, and Sankofa in the Bedroom, goes deeper, tracing the rites, rituals, and inherited wisdoms that shape how African women experience and claim pleasure on their own terms. Sharmaine Lovegrove published Nana Darkoa at Dialogue Books, and is delighted to welcome her to Chapters for an evening that is frank, warm, and entirely without apology.
An award-winning podcaster, festival curator, and Co-Founder of the Institute of Journalism and Social Change, Nana Darkoa is one of the most important voices working at the intersection of African womanhood, pleasure, and liberation. Her work has placed her on the BBC's 100 Inspirational and Influential Women list and New Africa magazine's 100 Inspirational Africans.
This is a conversation about sex, freedom, body sovereignty, and the radical act of telling the truth about African women's lives.
Tuesday 7 July | 19:00
Tickets: €10 – Book via Eventbrite
Barbados & Beyond
A Showcase of Contemporary Barbadian Writing
Something is happening in Barbados. A small island producing an outsized cultural force: a Prime Minister remaking the global conversation on climate justice, artists like Sheena Rose and Rihanna carrying Barbadian creative life into the world. The writers in this showcase are part of the same wave.
We are delighted to welcome Shakirah Bourne, Andie Davis, and Cherie Jones to Chapters for an evening that celebrates, interrogates, and refuses to be tidy about what it means to write from and about Barbados today.
Shakirah Bourne's work spans adult short fiction and middle grade novels rooted in Caribbean folklore. Her debut children's book Josephine Against the Sea received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and her short fiction collection In Time of Need won the Governor General Award for Excellence in Literary Fiction.
Andie Davis grew up in Barbados and her 2024 debut novel Let Me Liberate You announces a bold and distinctive voice. Her fiction has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Delmarva Review, and she is a 2026 Hedgebrook resident.
Cherie Jones is the author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and translated into French and German. The French translation won the Prix Carbet des lycéens in 2023.
Thursday 2 July | 19:00
Tickets: €5 Book via Eventbrite
Afrolution 2026 | Radical Geographies of Memory, Love, and Becoming
We’re looking forward to close out the month as the official booksellers at AFROLUTION Festival 2026. The festival is in its third year, hosted by community initiative Each One Teach One at their venue in the African Quarter of Wedding. This year’s edition of the festival, African / Diasporic Pluralverses III: Radical Geographies of Memory, Love, and Becoming, will feature readings, panel discussions and performances focusing on interconnected landscapes of memory across Africa and its diaspora. We’re honoured to be a part of this essential event series.
Find the full AFROLUTION program HERE
Chill & Chapters
Our ever-popular Chill & Chapters evening is back: a space to read alongside others, without pressure or programme. Come early, browse the shelves, find something that calls to you, and settle in with a free drink.
This is one of our favourite evenings at Chapters, and it fills up. Bring a book, or find one when you arrive, because we have a shop full of good ones and plenty of time before we begin to help you choose. Either way, the only thing asked of you is to show up, get comfortable, and read.
RSVP bookshop@chaptersberlin.com to reserve your place.
Chaos & Conviction
An evening with Nussaibah Younis, in conversation about faith, belonging, and Fundamentally
A novel about a British Asian academic sent to Iraq to work in deradicalisation should not be this funny. And yet.
Fundamentally is Nussaibah Younis’s award-winning, widely nominated, and highly celebrated debut novel, praised for its sharp intelligence, moral complexity, and dark humour, and confirming Younis as one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary fiction.
Nussaibah spent years working in deradicalisation before writing it, which is perhaps why the novel feels so lived-in, so incisive, and so unwilling to let anyone off the hook. Funny, politically sharp, and deeply humane, it asks difficult questions about faith, belonging, power, and the limits of intervention.
Sharmaine sits down with Nussaibah to talk about writing across politics and intimacy, finding comedy inside dark material, and what fiction can hold when it refuses easy answers.
A conversation about chaos, conviction, and the uneasy space where belief, identity, and humanity collide.
Tickets via Eventbrite
Voice & Witness
Batool Haidari and Naeema Ghani in conversation with Lucy Hannah
In August 2021, as the Taliban approached the gates of Kabul, twenty-one women writers messaged their WhatsApp group. They asked if everyone was safe. Over the next year, in that makeshift online refuge, they kept writing.
My Dear Kabul is their collective diary: a year of checkpoints and closed schools, of protest and flight, of life continuing under the most extreme clampdown on female freedom in living memory. The Guardian called it “fascinatingly detailed and fiercely brave.” Ali Smith said its courage is momentous.
The book exists because of Untold Narratives, a development programme for writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict. Founded by Lucy Hannah, Untold has spent years working with Afghan women writers to develop their craft, build networks, and bring their stories to new audiences. This is exactly the kind of work Chapters was built to stand behind.
Lucy Hannah sits down with contributors Batool Haidari and Naeema Ghani to talk about what it means to write under those conditions, and why it matters that we read it.
Tickets via Eventbrite
Moving & Magic
Our first children's event at Chapters, and you made it happen.
A bright and joyful event for the whole family.
Berlin-based author Madhvi Ramani will be reading her new children’s book Move Your Body! in the garden of Chapters.
The book celebrates the magic of moving in an interactive session followed by a Q&A so kids can ask all their burning questions like How is a book made? Who does the pictures? How long does it take? and How old are you?
Ideal for children aged 3- 8 years old, and for adults who love picture books (we see you!) Anyone who has children in their lives and wants a special signed copy of this gorgeous picture book is welcome to come along, connect to their inner child, and do a little boogie.
Fire & Freedom
We are delighted to welcome Jane Flett to Chapters for an evening around her second novel, Welcome to the Chaoskampf, published by Doubleday this May. It's another sticky summer in New Orleans, the world is ending, and Marcy has just met a crew of degenerate filmmakers hell-bent on summoning the apocalypse. What follows is filth, arson, debauchery, and the question of what it means to burn your life down and find out what's left.
A Scottish writer based in Berlin and beloved in the writing community here, Jane Flett writes with an energy that is entirely her own, and this is an evening for anyone who has ever wanted to set something on fire.
Tickets here.
Romantic & Ruinous Book Club
This month’s Romantic & Ruinous Book Club turns to Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Few novels have asked harder questions about the nature of love, obsession, and what we are willing to endure in its name. Florentino Ariza waits 51 years, 9 months and 4 days for the woman he loves. He is, as someone who knows him well puts it, ugly and sad. But he is all love.
García Márquez writes, as the New York Times put it, "with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity." This is a novel about what it means to vow love forever and actually mean it, set against war, plague, and the slow devastation of time. It is also very funny. We have been wanting to bring this one to Romantic & Ruinous for a while, and June feels exactly right.
RSVP Essential — bookshop@chaptersberlin.com
Rupture & Remain
Sophie Mackintosh is one of the most compelling writers working in European fiction today. Her debut The Water Cure announced a voice of rare precision and menace, and her readers have followed her faithfully ever since.
Blue Ticket gave us a society that decides who gets to be a mother. Cursed Bread gave us desire as a kind of haunting. And now Permanence: Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they have slipped away from their respective lives, sharing stolen afternoons in anonymous hotel rooms. Until one day they wake up in a bedroom neither of them recognises, with no memory of how they got there, in a strange and impossible city populated entirely by adulterers. Cloudless skies. Ripe fruit on the table each morning. No way out. Just the two of them, and the question they can no longer avoid.
Sharmaine has been reading her since the beginning and this is the conversation she's wanted to have.
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Chapters at Doxumentale: A History of the World in Six Plagues — Edna Bonhomme
Six epidemics, from cholera to COVID-19, as a lens on power, inequality, and exclusion. Bonhomme, who teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts and lives here in the city, brings history, memoir, and cultural criticism together into something essential.
Tickets via the Doxumentale website
Chapters at Doxumentale: Braver New World — John Kampfner
A journey across the globe in search of societies doing things differently, from intergenerational care in Japan to social housing in Vienna. Kampfner makes a case for pragmatic optimism at a moment when it feels hard to come by.
Tickets via the Doxumentale website
Language & Loss
We are delighted to welcome Hilda Hoy to Chapters for an evening around her debut essay collection Mother Tongue, published this March by Wind & Bones. Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy traces how English became her dominant tongue, and what was lost in that process. When her mother is diagnosed with dementia and begins losing the ability to speak, the repercussions of that loss come into sharp and tender focus.
A dear friend of Chapters and a Berlin-based writer, editor, and translator, this is an evening about language, identity, and what it means to find your voice between worlds.
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Power & Inheritance
Quinn Slobodian has spent years tracing the intellectual lineage of ideas that present themselves as new. His two latest books, Hayek's Bastards (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for criticism) and Muskism, released this March, do exactly that: they follow the money, the theory, and the rhetoric back to where it came from. Slobodian is one of the few historians working today who can make the deep structure of power legible without flattening it.
He sits down with Peter Matthews, founding editor of Heist Magazine and host of Dig Where You Stand, for a conversation recorded live at Chapters. Together they'll pull apart the language of IQ science and "debugging" society, tracing how these ideas connect to something much older and much more dangerous. We are living inside arguments that were made a long time ago. This conversation traces them back to the source.
Tickets here.
READ & RESIST
Maaza Mengiste is one of the most important writers working today. Her novel The Shadow King — shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the LA Times Book Prize, and named book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Time, and others — confirmed her as a writer of rare power and precision. Her debut, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, remains a landmark of contemporary African fiction. Across novels, essays, and photography, her work returns again and again to history’s buried truths: who is remembered, who is erased, and what it costs to look clearly at both.
Maaza is currently a fellow at the American Academy where she is working on her third novel, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, set in the city during the interwar period, centred on a Black German woman navigating art, politics, and survival as the Nazis consolidate power. It is a book rooted in this city’s own history, and there is no better place to begin that conversation than here.
romantic & ruinous
Our Romantic & Ruinous book club is alive and flourishing into May! These monthly meetings continue as a space to read closely, think together, and return to books that hold complexity around love, identity, and desire. These are conversations that move between the personal and the political, the intimate and the structural.
This month‘s book: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
A novel of queer longing, displacement, and the relentless search for self. Told in sharp, shifting vignettes between the US and the Middle East, the novel follows a young woman coming into adulthood whose desires are shaped as much by repression as by hunger.
SEEN & HEARD
In a world that has long expected women to follow a single prescribed path, Nicole’s book offers something rare: serious, tender, and unflinching company. Drawing on her own journey and the voices of women she found across the world, she builds a portrait of lives lived outside the maternal script — and in doing so, creates the community she was looking for. This is a book that finds its readers and brings them together.
This evening is a particularly special one for Chapters. Sharmaine edited and published Others Like Me at Dialogue Books, making this a genuine homecoming — the book returning to the hands that first believed in it, in conversation with the author who wrote it. There are not many evenings quite like this one.
Desire & Obsession
On 30 April, we welcome Sophie Robinson to Chapters to celebrate Oyster Prairie, a novel of queer longing, artistic fixation, and the dangerous pull of becoming someone else.
At its centre is a woman on the edge of herself, her work, and her life, drawn into an intense relationship with an older female filmmaker she both desires and mythologises. What follows is a story of obsession, projection, and the fragile line between admiration and erasure.
In conversation with Sharmaine Lovegrove, the evening will explore queer desire without sentimentality, ambition and self-destruction, and the creative lives women build and break in pursuit of something bigger
Expect a reading, a conversation, and space to stay a while after.
Voice & Power
We’re delighted to welcome Nani Jansen Reventlow to Chapters for an evening of conversation around her book Radical Justice.
Nani is a human rights lawyer and the founder of Systemic Justice, a law firm for movements working to put the power of strategic litigation in the hands of marginalised communities.
Radical Justice explores how change happens, and who gets to shape it. Moving between personal stories, global case studies, and wider questions of power, it asks what it means to understand the root causes of injustice, and how each of us might play a role in addressing them.
In conversation with Sharmaine Lovegrove, the evening will explore questions of voice, power, and responsibility. Who is heard. Who is represented. And how change is built, collectively and over time.
Reading & Reflection
Tarot Reading With Lunar Tarot
We’re introducing Tarot Tuesday at Chapters, an evening of tarot and books led by Lunar Tarot. A natural extension of what we’ve always believed the shop to be, a place to come curious and leave with a discovery.
Lunar Tarot offers a contemporary and considered approach to tarot, grounded in attention, clarity, and what sits just beneath the surface. Throughout the evening, there will be one-to-one readings, quiet, focused, and precise.
Around them, the bookshop responds in its own way. Tables drawn from across the shelves, thinking about intuition, change, and the stories we turn to when we are trying to understand where we are, and where we might be going.
Readings:
Single card reading — €5
Three card reading — €10
ROMANTIC & RUINOUS BOOKCLUB
Our Romantic & Ruinous book club continues as a space to read closely, think together, and return to books that hold complexity around love, desire, and identity. These are conversations that move between the personal and the political, the intimate and the structural.
This month’s book: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
A timeless, piercing exploration of love, identity, and the cost of self-denial. Baldwin’s novel remains as urgent and affecting now as when it was first published, asking difficult questions about who we allow ourselves to be, and at what cost.
This session is now fully booked.
Memory & Translation
Julia Franck in conversation with translator Imogen Taylor
We are delighted to welcome Julia Franck to Chapters for a special evening of conversation.
Julia Franck is one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists, known for her psychologically sharp and historically resonant writing. Her latest book, Worlds Apart, newly translated into English by Imogen Taylor, offers a deeply personal exploration of memory, identity, and the experience of growing up between worlds.
Drawing on Franck’s early diaries and formative years, the book traces the emergence of a literary voice shaped by family history, displacement, and the complexities of life in a divided Germany.
Franck will be joined by translator Imogen Taylor, whose work brings this intimate and layered text to English-language readers. Together, they will discuss the book, the relationship between lived experience and fiction, and the art of translation.
€10 tickets on Eventbrite
Späti Stories × Chapters – Community Book Swap
This March, we’re pleased to welcome Späti Stories into the shop.
Known for their monthly newsletter exploring Berlin through conversations, perspectives, and the city’s distinctive cultural fabric, Späti Stories creates space for reflection on the people and ideas that shape life here. Their work resonates deeply with what we value at Chapters: curiosity, exchange, and community.
Together, we’re hosting a relaxed evening built around one simple idea — sharing books that have meant something to us.
Because a book swap is never only about the story itself. It is also about the life a book has already lived: the notes in the margins, the underlined passages, the quiet traces of another reader.
How it works
• Bring one book that is meaningful to you
• Upon arrival, write a short dedication to its future reader
• All books will be placed together
• Each participant chooses one book to take home
To participate
• Please reserve a ticket here
• Bringing a book is essential
• Kindly bring a book you genuinely wish to share
This is a true exchange. Once you select a book, it becomes yours to keep.
After the swap, you’re welcome to stay — to talk, meet fellow readers, or perhaps connect with the person whose book you chose.
chill & Chapters
Our quieter reading sessions continue to offer a gentle pause in the week. A space to read, reflect, and simply spend time with a book.
In the spirit of International Women’s Day, this gathering offers a small invitation: spend the evening with a book written by a woman or another gender-marginalised (FLINTA) writer.
Across our shelves you’ll find novels, essays, poetry, and memoir — new voices and established ones, recent releases and books that have long shaped the canon.
A quiet way of making space. Of recognising the breadth of voices that shape literature.
Choose something that shifts your thinking, steadies you, or simply keeps you company. As always, there is no expectation to speak. Just time to read, reflect, and share the room.
To RSVP please email bookshop@chaptersberlin.com
Romantic & ruinous bookclub
Our book club continues to become one of the most animated corners of Chapters: engaged, curious, and never short on opinion.
As a core part of the Chapters team and our resident romance expert, Saleema brings both deep genre knowledge and a keen instinct for the unexpected.
On 9th March, we will be discussing Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi. A bold, sensual paranormal romance where desire, power, and the supernatural collide.
RSVP via bookshop@chaptersberlin.com
Listen & Reflect - Nimm die Alpen weg
Nimm die Alpen weg, Audiobook Listening Party. Written by Ralph Tharayil and produced by Kollo Media,
Pleasure & Pause
Join us for a four-day pop-up with Dilekerei, a much-loved Berlin café known for its beautifully made cakes, cookies, tarts, and pastries, all baked with real care. Come for yourself. Come with someone you love. Come for the pleasure of it.
Romantic & Ruinous Bookclub
This month, Romantic & Ruinous turns to a classic that still refuses to behave: Wuthering Heights.
Gather & Celebrate Tash Aw
Tash Aw joins us at Chapters for an evening of reading and conversation.
He joins us to read from and discuss The South, a luminous, expansive novel that moves between landscapes, generations, and intimate inner lives. In conversation with Sharmaine Lovegrove, Tash will reflect on inheritance and longing, the quiet forces that shape who we become, and what it means to belong.
10€ on EventBrite