The New Indian Express ·
HarperCollins gets to be the publishing biggie of the year
NEW DELHI: In 1980, Delhi publisher Vision Books published My Truth, the closest to an Indira Gandhi official autobiography. Printed as a series of interviews with a French journalist, it includes her childhood, Jawaharlal Nehru advising her to be physically active, touches upon her marriage and contextualises “her truths” of her momentous years— the Bangladesh Liberation War and Emergency — for all readers.
It was also not a time known for high-voltage book launches and announcements. In comparison, the notice of her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, has gone out with a bang, a bump, and again a second blow of the trumpet. While it has generated excitement about its contents, the bigger excitement has been about a story of ‘refusal’.
First came the announcement of Alfred A Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House) publishing it, then a clarification that Penguin India is not its India publisher, and finally the HarperCollins announcement. The publishing biggie of the year no doubt belongs to HarperCollins, which on Friday morning confirmed it was publishing Sonia’s memoir, one of the most anticipated political ‘autobiographies’ of our times.
