Store Review: Title Waves

If parents of students enrolled at Duruelo Convent High School in Bandra find their kids coming home later than usual, it’s probably because of Title Waves. The suburb’s newest bookstore, Title Waves has opened right across the road from the institute. On a weekday evening, we found a handful of uniformed fifth graders huddled over Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series in the sprawling, 9,000 square feet bookstore. Children’s literature, along with books on marketing, advertising and media, are among the genres well represented at the split-level store. This is because store owners Sharon and Elvis Dias are advertising professionals who also dabble in theatre, specifically gospel musicals.

The husband and wife duo, who run the advertising agency AMO Communications, share a love for reading, a passion that prompted them to start their own bookstore. With Title Waves, they hope to give the city “its first boutique bookstore, where each selection is made after extensive research on the Internet”, said Elvis Dias. Which explains why for a store this large, the shelves are quite sparsely stocked. “It’s not about numbers,” he said. “We believe in offering only few albeit quality titles.”

The store offers the standard range of classics like The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, A Clockwork Orange, Frankenstein and Persuasion, published by Penguin, Harper Collins and Random House. Poetry hounds will find anthologies by Arthur Rimbaud, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda, Vikram Seth, William Blake and Ogden Nash. In the graphic novels section, which occupies just a single column of shelves, you will find DC’s Batman comics, and Marvel’s Daredevil, Avenger and The Dark Tower series, the latter of which is based on Stephen King’s novels. In the relatively larger Food section, there are such culinary texts as Larousse Gastronomique, The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum and also recipe books by Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Rachel Ray and Madhur Jaffrey.

However, the Indian writing section, which includes titles by Khushwant Singh, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, is quite dire. It did not include either Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga or River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. More underwhelming than the Indian writing section is the store’s music selection. The music CDs are mostly compilations (there’s jazz, pop, western classical and rock) plus a few elevator muzak staples like Kenny G. and Yanni. The DVD section, too, is nothing special, with a mix of old titles like A Fish Called Wanda and The Silence of The Lambs taking up shelf space with a smattering of newer ones such as The Lincoln Lawyer and Rio.

On Saturday, October 1, the Diases will launch The Leatherbound Lounge in the basement of the store. This will house a Barista counter and shelves of hardbound classics by Shakespeare, and Arthur Conan Doyle among others. Customers will be allowed to read these books in the lounge, as they would in a reference library. A section of the lounge will be reserved for dance and music performances, literature workshops and book launches.

Title Waves is five-minutes walking distance from the Crossword bookstore on Turner Road in Bandra. Its advantage over the latter is that it is uncluttered. All the shelves are numbered to make locating a book much easier and customers have access to a touchscreen computer, which provides listing and pricing information on current stocks. In case they don’t have a book you want, they also promise to acquire it for you within a day. However, when it comes to the variety of books on offer, Crossword has a lot more to offer.

Title Waves

LocationOpposite Duruelo Convent School
In the same lane as Tawa restaurant
Off Turner Road
Bandra (West)

Phone2651 0841

HoursDaily, 10am to 9pm