Garden Books

Garden books aims to be your friendly local bookshop

Garden books aims to be your friendly local bookshop. Located above the ever popular Sequoia café, it has a sizeable collection of books on its dark wood shelves and even a well-lit kids area complete with giant ladybird cushions. Tomes on offer range from Chinese language learning books to coffee table volumes and life changing novels. There's also a decent selection of China books, both business and fiction, and a huge blue wedge of Lonely Planet guidebooks (as well as a handful of Time Out city guides to Shanghai and Hong Kong). Foreign language magazines are currently limited to business titles (The Economist, Time, etc), but Paris Match, Vogue and National Geographic are also sporadically available. Prices are reasonable, but still more expensive than amazon. A book that costs 14USD is sold for 140RMB for example, but it's a pleasant place to pick up some weekend reading on a Friday lunchtime.

Garden Books (above Sequoia Café) 44 Guanghua Lu, opposite the (yellow) Brazilian Embassy building, Chaoyang district (tel 6585 1435). Open 8am-8pm daily.