Decolonise Your Shelf Book Club

Thu 24 Sep 11am - 12:30pm
Event's cover picture

Decolonise Your Shelf Book Club

Thu 24 Sep 11am - 12:30pm

The Chestnut Tree Bookshop, Melbourne

Our Decolonise Your Shelf Book Club is a reflective and conversation-led reading group dedicated to engaging with First Nations, Black, and other racialised writers, and with books that challenge dominant narratives and expand the way we understand history, place, and power. Each month, our booksellers curate a carefully chosen title across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and essays, selected for its depth, insight, and capacity to provoke meaningful discussion.

This book club is open to readers at all stages of their learning journey. You don’t need prior knowledge, just a willingness to listen, reflect, and engage respectfully. Discussions are guided, supportive, and community-minded, creating space for curiosity, discomfort, growth, and connection.

As an independent bookshop rooted in community, we centre voices that have long been marginalised and under-represented on our shelves. Together, we read with care, intention, and openness, using books as a starting point for learning, unlearning, and collective conversation.

Our Book Selection:

January: Dream Hotel - Laila Lalami

February: Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte

March: Kin - Tayari Jones

April: Yniga - Glenn Diaz

May: Not Quite White in the Head - Melissa Lucashenko

June: Celestial Lights - Cecile Pin

July: Strange Girls - Sarvat Hasin

August: Medea Sang Me a Corrido - Dahlia de la Cerda

September: The Great Wherever - Shannon Sanders

October: The Hair of the Pigeon - Mohammed Massoud Morsi