HarperCollins to release 25 special-edition books on silver jubilee year

Amitav Ghosh, A P J Abdul Kalam and Aravind Adiga included in the 'Harper 25 Series'

HarperCollins India has come out special editions of 25 of its popular books to celebrate its 25th anniversary of publishing.

Among the books in the "Harper 25 Series" are Amitav Ghosh's "The Hungry Tide", "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga, A P J Abdul Kalam's "Turning Points", Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies", "Fault Lines" by Raghuram G Rajan and Siddhartha Mukherjee's "The Emperor of All Maladies".

HarperCollins began its journey in 1992 with 20 books that year. Twenty-five years later, it boasts a list of over 180 new books a year in every genre possible, be it literary and commercial fiction, general and commercial non-fiction, translations, poetry, children's books or Hindi.

According to HarperCollins India's Publisher (Literary) Udayan Mitra, the Harper 25 series gives the readers the chance to "revisit some of these wonderful books".

"Publishing is all about the love for reading, and in the 25 years that we have been in India, we have published books that have been read with joy, talked about, debated over, and then read once again; between them, they have also won virtually every literary award there is to win," he says.

HarperCollins India's art director, Bonita Vaz-Shimray, who conceptualised the design for the Harper 25 series, says the series is a "celebration of the HarperCollins brand - its identity and colours - the iconic Harper red and blue have been interpreted in watercolour media by Berlin-based Indian artist Allen Shaw".

Each cover illustration is a story in itself - a story that's open-ended, a story that sets the mood for what's going to come, a story that starts taking definite shape only after the reader has finished reading the book, Bonita says.