Palpasa Cafe

A journalist sits in a café waiting for his subject-an artist called Drishya about whom he wants to write a novel. But Drishya doesn’t come. For that morning he has been visited by Maoists at his home and abducted by them…
So begins Palpasa Café, the extraordinary novel by Nepali journalist Narayan Wagle which has become a sensation in the country. Starting with the murders of the royal family, it tells the troubled story of contemporary Nepal through the eyes of a romantic artist who falls in love, wanders the war-struck countryside and dreams of creating a café named after his beloved which serves the best coffee in the country. Playful, moving and melancholic, fusing the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, Palpasa Café presents a rare picture of Nepal at war. It is one of the most important novels to come out of the country.
Narayan Wagle is an acclaimed journalist and was the editor of Kantipur Daily, Nepal’s largest circulating newspaper. Palpasa Café, his first novel, was published in 2005 and became a bestseller, selling over 40,000 copies and winning the Madan Puraskar, Nepal’s most prestigious literary prize. It was translated into English in 2008. Narayan Wagle lives in Kathmandu.

‘What Wagle has been writing in the mainstream print media is real but this novel is even more real -The Kathmandu Post
“A clever and original novel set amid the death and fear of the Maoist guerrilla war in Nepal’ -Independent