Saleem Haddad's only Berlin event this year, in conversation with Sharmaine on Floodlines and Guapa.

Saleem Haddad comes to Chapters for his only Berlin event this year, and we couldn't be more thrilled to have him. Sharmaine sits down with him to talk Floodlines, his sweeping new novel following three estranged Iraqi-British sisters pulled back together by the discovery of their late father's lost paintings, an inheritance that unearths exile, betrayal, and a homeland none of them fully recognise anymore. Spanning continents and decades against the backdrop of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it's already been named one of the New Yorker's best books of the year.

They'll also touch on his blistering debut, Guapa, a 2017 Stonewall Honor Book and Polari Prize winner, following twenty-four hours in the life of a young gay translator whose world unravels after his grandmother catches him with his lover, set against a country reeling from the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Both novels are published in German by Albino Verlag, with the German edition of Floodlines landing this same September, making this the perfect moment to bring Saleem to Berlin.

Copies of both books will be available on the night, with a signing after the conversation.

Tickets available here.

Edna Bonhomme in Conversation with Emilia Roig

Edna Bonhomme is a dear friend of Chapters, and it's a wonderful occasion for us to host the launch of her new memoir, Tending to Our Wounds.

The book moves through Berlin, New York, Cairo, Harlem, Port-au-Prince and Miami, finding in each city another layer of the same inheritance: what colonialism and racial capitalism leave in the body, and what it takes to carry that history without being flattened by it. Robin D.G. Kelley calls it an accounting of what it cost Africans throughout the diaspora to enrich a European ruling class, and Sophie Lewis describes it as memoir, history and politics braided together with rare fluidity. We think it's one of the most necessary books of the year.

Edna is a historian of science, critic and journalist who has called Berlin home since 2017. Her first book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, was shortlisted for Best Science Book in Austria and praised for exposing how deeply Western medicine is entangled with colonialism and capitalism. Her essays appear in the Atlantic, the Guardian and the London Review of Books, among others, and Tending to Our Wounds is her second book, and her most personal.

She'll be joined in conversation by Emilia Roig, founder of the Berlin-based Center for Intersectional Justice and author of the bestselling Why We Matter: Das Ende der Unterdrückung (Why We Matter: The End of Oppression), which traced the intersections of racism, homophobia and patriarchy through her own family history and became one of the defining German nonfiction books of its year. Roig has spent the years since teaching intersectionality and critical race theory across Europe and the US, and her work on love, marriage and liberation in Das Ende der Ehe: Für eine Revolution der Liebe (The End of Marriage: For a Revolution of Love) makes her exactly the right interlocutor for a book so concerned with what healing actually requires.

We know what's trending, but we also know where it came from, and this conversation sits right at that intersection: two Berlin-based thinkers, two bodies of work in close conversation with each other, one evening to sit with all of it together.

Copies of Tending to Our Wounds as well as all of Edna and Emilia Roig's books will be available on the night, with both authors signing after the conversation.

Tickets here.

Magazine Launch: WAYF Journal #2

WAYF, short for Where Are You From, takes a question that lands differently depending on who is asking it and who is answering, and turns it into a literary journal. WAYF is an international journal of literature and art centring diaspora voices, and we are thrilled to be hosting the Berlin launch of their second issue.

This issue’s theme is Maximalism, and the evening will be exactly that: new voices, spoken and sung, daring to resist, celebrating the maximalism of heritage, and refusing to be flattened into a single identity. Come curious and leave with a stack of names to follow.

Founding co-editors Suad Kamardeen and Sahra Malin run WAYF between Berlin and London. For this evening, Sahra will be joined by a lineup of writers and artists featured in the second issue.

RSVP wayfjournal@gmail.com

Book Launch: The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women by Shahed Ezaydi

Shahed Ezaydi in conversation with Sofio Rukhadze In partnership with Feminist Fiction Berlin.

We are delighted to welcome Shahed Ezaydi to Chapters for an evening exploring her book, The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women, a sharp and necessary challenge to the myths that shape how Muslim women are seen, and by whom. We are especially glad to be hosting this one with our friends at the incredible and inspiring Feminist Fiction Berlin, whose work building space for intersectional feminist conversation makes them the perfect partners for this evening.

Growing up, Shahed was often asked how she could call herself a feminist and still practise her faith, a question that points to a much deeper problem: Muslim women being ignored in feminist spaces entirely, or cast as passive victims in need of rescue. The Othered Woman is the book Shahed wishes her younger self could have turned to. It dismantles the narrow white feminism that fuels gendered Islamophobia and centres the voices of intersectional feminists fighting for liberation on their own terms. Accessible, compelling, and urgent, this is essential reading for anyone who considers themselves a feminist.

Shahed will be in conversation with Sofio Rukhadze for the evening.

Tickets €5 via Eventbrite

In Conversation: Angela Flournoy on Her Writing and Work

Angela Flournoy in conversation with Sharmaine Lovegrove.

We are honoured to welcome National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy to Chapters for an evening exploring her writing life, from her celebrated debut The Turner House to her much-anticipated second novel, The Wilderness.

The Turner House introduced readers to a sprawling Detroit family and a house that held their history, earning Flournoy comparisons to some of the great American chroniclers of family and place. The Wilderness follows five Black women across twenty years of friendship, ambition, and the strange, unmoored middle stretch between young adulthood and midlife, a novel The Washington Post named one of the ten best books of 2025 and Booklist called "absorbing, uplifting, and poignant."

Join us for a conversation about craft, community, and the long arc of a writing life, hosted by Sharmaine Lovegrove.

Tickets: €5 Book via EventBrite 

We are thrilled to host a joint celebration for two of the sharpest new voices in British fiction, Anna Maconochie and Leon Craig, as they bring their latest books to Moabit.

Anna Maconochie's Diamond Life (Héloïse Press) is a collection of urban short stories following London millennials chasing creative lives, failed aspirations, romantic fiascos, and the particular chaos of faking it until you make it. From a disastrous blind date to a struggling artist promised change by a Soho fortune teller, these are stories about ambition, desire, and the gap between the life you want and the one you are actually living.

Leon Craig's The Decadence (Sceptre) is a lush, unsettling ghost story about a group of late twenty-somethings bickering, seething, and hard partying their way through a decaying country house, its history as menacing as anything supernatural. Sharlene Teo calls it a novel with "a keen eye for observation and a very dark and distinctive imagination."

Come for two very different visions of what it means to be young, restless, and a little bit doomed, and stay for the wine.

Tickets 5 € via EventBrite 

The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America.

Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires.

Beneath the shimmering surface of his life, Gatsby is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon, this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for – in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream – Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.

RSVP Essential — bookshop@chaptersberlin.com

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

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.

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

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

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.

RSVP bookshop@chaptersberlin.com

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

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

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