Hachette India Posts

HACHETTE INDIA MD THOMAS ABRAHAM RETIRES, RITI JAGOORIE TO SUCCEED HIM

12 June 2025, New Delhi:

Hachette India announced that its founding Managing Director, Thomas Abraham, who has been instrumental in shaping the company and strengthening its philosophy, market presence and profitable growth for eighteen years has chosen to retire at the company’s retirement age.

Headhunted from his role as CEO & President of Penguin India, Abraham joined Hachette India as MD in 2007, steering the company from an INR 8 crore start-up to an INR 100 crore thriving publishing house; doing so for the second time (he’d earlier taken Penguin from a 30 cr level trebling turnover to the 100 cr bracket) .

Alongside growth, over the past few years Abraham delivered a steady bottom-line of over 15% unequalled by any other trade publishing company on both value and percentage terms. During his tenure, the company set several records for hardback sales on release, including Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way. While the company’s dominant revenue stream is from its imports, the local divisions publish an eclectic list that includes 100,000 plus sellers Indra Nooyi, Roopa Pai, as well as marquee authors Anuradha Roy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar, Chess World Champion Viswanathan Anand, Super Chefs Manish Mehrotra and Ritu Dalmia, and Business author Subroto Bagchi among others. Abraham personally curated and reissued a legacy imprint, Yellowbacks (comprising classics of adventure, crime and pulp fiction) in India which will be released in the UK and US at the end of 2025.

‘It’s been a tremendous journey, and I’ve loved every moment of it, but after 25 years of running operating companies, it’s time to step back and read something for pleasure beyond P&Ls and balance sheets. I’m delighted that I’m able to leave at an all-time high for us, and with the talented team we have, I have no doubt it will continue to go higher. This journey would not have been possible without the unstinting support from Richard Kitson, David Shelley, and Charlie King, the wonderful teams at Hachette India and Hachette UK’, said Abraham.

Richard Kitson, Deputy CEO of Hachette UK and Hachette Book Group and Chair of HUK International said: ‘Thomas has been the most amazing MD and colleague since he helped found Hachette India 18 years ago. Since then, the company has grown every year and is now the 3rd largest narrative trade publisher in the country with a brilliant team working there and so many individual successes that he has been responsible for. Thomas is one of the most strategic leaders I’ve had the pleasure to work with as well as being one of the warmest and most generous with his time and knowledge. He also knows more than anyone about such a diverse range of subjects, particularly the Hodder Yellowbacks, Sherlock Holmes and out of copyright authors in general, as well as jazz or classic rock music from the 60s and 70s. He will be hugely missed by us all at Hachette – in India and the wider group – and we wish him a long and happy retirement.’

Following Abraham’s retirement, Riti Jagoorie will step up from her current role as VP of Product & Marketing in January 2026 to lead the business, which has delivered growth of over 12% over the past ten years. Reporting to Charlie King, CEO of Hachette UK International, she will lead the Board at Hachette India.

Jagoorie joined Hachette India in 2008 as one of its first employees and the product manager for Little, Brown & Headline. Her exceptional performance saw her promoted to Head of Product and deliver strong results with UK divisions, including: Little, Brown, which grew from a INR 50 million list in 2008, to INR 350 million in 2024; Hodder from INR 20 million to INR 110 million, and Profile (represented in India by Hachette) from INR 23 million in 2013 to INR 175 million in 2024. She led the marketing and publicity campaign for Indra Nooyi’s My Life in Full, which has sold 140,000 copies since its release in 2021, and she picked and promoted bestsellers like The Devotion of Suspect X, The Silent Patient and The Empire of the Moghul series, to name a few. One of her key strengths has been her ability to work closely with booksellers across the country and curate the immense range of titles published by the Hachette group.

‘I feel so fortunate to be a part of Hachette India and to bring the brilliant books we publish to readers all over the world. It has been such a privilege to work with and learn from someone as incredibly knowledgeable, experienced and inspiring as Thomas. I am grateful to him for hiring me, for always encouraging and guiding me and for trusting me to take this company forward’, said Jagoorie. ‘I am also very thankful to the top leadership at Hachette: David, Richard and Charlie, for this amazing opportunity. Thomas has built a solid business with a great team and a fantastic track record and I am excited to step up and ensure that we honour that legacy and continue to deliver the best results – for our books and our authors’, she added.

Thomas Abraham remarked: ‘Riti has been with the company since it began operations from day one. She’s grown with the company, been absolutely integral to our success, and her contribution has been invaluable. I’m so pleased and proud that she will lead the business. Her instinct for books and her flair for business are exceptional, and I’m in no doubt that she will take the company to new heights.’

Group CEO Charlie King said: ‘I am absolutely delighted that Riti is stepping up to become MD of Hachette India. She has contributed so much to the business over her 17 years with Hachette as an integral member of Thomas Abrahams’ senior team. Riti has razor-sharp commercial instincts, strong editorial judgement, excellent people-skills and – most importantly – an exciting vision for the future of Hachette’s business in India. I am greatly looking forward to working with Riti and the team to continue building on an extraordinary time of growth under Thomas’s leadership.’
About Hachette India

Hachette India is the Indian arm of Hachette UK, which is the second largest trade publishing company in the world, and is itself owned by Hachette Livre, France’s largest publisher and part of the Lagardère Group. The Hachette Group is the oldest trade publisher in the world having celebrated 250 years in 2018.

The Bookseller, 12 June 2025

13 June 2025

“Test Cricket: A Biography: The Story of Test Cricket 1877 to Today” by Tim Wigmore

I absolutely enjoyed reading Tim Wigmore’s book on text cricket. I barely watch the game now but while reading the book, I realised how much I knew. Even if one is unfamiliar with the game or details, this is an absolutely delicious book. Tim Wigmore’s writing is as elegant as the game he writes about. It has been published by Hachette India.

The first narrative history of Test cricket as it nears its 150th birthday, telling the story of how the game has evolved since 1877, told through the moments and personalities that have shaped the format. With a focus on the game and its broader significance alike Tim Wigmore gives Test cricket its historical and social context, whilst reminding us that it’s unrivalled as a fascinating sporting spectacle. Meticulously researched and told with the passion of an award-winning writer, Test Cricket is also illuminated by a series of gripping fresh interviews with more than forty stars of international test cricket.

Here is a book extract published on Moneycontrol.

I interviewed Tim Wigmore for TOI Bookmark. Here is the Spotify link:

Tim Wigmore is the author of Test Cricket: A History, a new narrative history based on dozens of new interviews and years of research. He is also the author of Crickonomics, a Waterstones Sports Book of the Year, and Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, which won the Wisden Book of the Year and Daily Telegraph Cricket Book of the Year in 2020. He is a sports writer for The Daily Telegraph, and has also written for The Economist, The New York Times, ESPNCricinfo and The New Statesman.

11 June 2025

“The Unicorn Woman” by Gayl Jones

I have received a copy of Pulitzer Prize finalist Gayl Jones’s novel The Unicorn Woman. It has been published by Hachette India.

This extraordinary new novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not to glory, but to their Jim Crow communities.

A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.

His odyssey takes him not only from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee, but back into his own memories, as he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and his encounters with a dazzling array of almost mythical characters: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, bigots, and – most unforgettably – the Unicorn Woman herself.

With her inimitable eye for beauty, tragedy and humour, Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of the Black imagination in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.

Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable; from a historical standpoint, she stands at the very cutting edge of understanding the modern world, and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour, and incisiveness, is unmatched. Jones is a writer’s writer, and her influence is found everywhere — Imani Perry

10 June 2025

“Raj Khosla: The Authorized Biography”

I received a copy of Raj Khosla: The Authorized Biography, published by Hachette India. It is the definitive biography. I am looking forward to reading it. Meanwhile, here is the book blurb.

The 1940s witnessed the scripting of an origin story that would go down in the books. A young man was signed on by Guru Dutt as assistant director after eager assurances of his competency in Hindi, a white lie that was soon unmasked.

This was Raj Khosla, an aspiring playback singer, eager to get a foot in the door any which way. In a plot twist he would have approved of, he became instead a filmmaker who made a habit of hits, routinely setting the box office on fire.

He made taut thrillers (C.I.D.) , family dramas (Do Raaste) , timeless romances (Do Badan) and action spectacles (Dostana) . Few filmmakers have demonstrated such versatility and command over their craft. He was behind some of Hindi cinema’s most enduring soundtracks, from ‘Lag ja gale’ to ‘Jhumka gira re’ to ‘Jaane kya baat hai’. Yet, Raj’s legacy remains confined to the odd footnote. Through interviews with family, friends and coworkers – including Asha Bhosle, Waheeda Rehman, Mumtaz, Asha Parekh, Sharmila Tagore, Dharmendra, Manoj Kumar, Prem Chopra, Bindu, Mahesh Bhatt and Aamir Khan – this biography addresses this glaring gap in the history of Bollywood. Examining Raj Khosla’s work, it reveals a director and a man who was as talented and sensitive as he was flawed. The result is a tender treatment that lays bare a caring employer,a

Napoleon fanboy, a maudlin soul who wore his heart on his sleeve, a passionate lover of music, and a man who transformed Hindi cinema.

Amborish Roychoudhury is the author of In a Cult of Their Own: Bollywood Beyond Box Office and Sridevi: The South Years. His work has appeared in Hindustan Times, Firstpost and Outlook India, among others. His first book won him a special mention at the 66th National Film Awards. He has served on film festival juries and explores India’s cinematic legacy through his work.

Anita Khosla did her postgraduation in mass media from Sophia College, Mumbai, and went on to pursue a career in journalism, writing for Screen, Filmfare and Eve’s Weekly back in the 1980s. Today, she serves as the proprietor of Raj Khosla Films, is a proud mother and grandmother, and lives in Gurugram.

Uma Khosla Kapur, an alumnus of St. Bede’s College, Simla, is a homemaker, wife and mother, in addition to being a director at Raj Khosla Films. She has inherited her father’s great passion for music, and lives with her husband G.M. Kapur in Kolkata.

7 June 2025

Introducing the Summer of GRISHAM 

Hachette India has released a new look for the legal thrillers by John Grisham. They are these gorgeous summery colours. Surprisingly, the use of various shades of pink/flame pink seem to do wonders for the new book jackets. The covers shown in the Amazon India links below are of the older editions. Nevertheless, they will take you directly to the book page to choose whichever option you would like to buy.

John Grisham is the author of more than fifty consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Boys From Biloxi, The Judge’s List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

John lives on a farm in central Virginia.

4 June 2025

“Our Future is Biotech” by Andrew Craig

Welcome to the biotech revolution

In the last century, technology has transformed the human experience across the world. This has been super-charged by the arrival of the internet, smart phones, AI and machine learning, and created trillion-plus dollar companies and household names like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Our Future is Biotech explains why biotech is next: because our biggest remaining challenges as a species concern biological systems.

Biotech companies will solve our most intractable problems, from cancer, dementia, obesity and diabetes to elderly care, mental health conditions, and even clean power generation, agricultural production and environmental degradation.

Biotech means that we can all live better, safer, healthier, wealthier, happier, and longer lives. The industry has already delivered “miracle cures” for several diseases, and there is more to come. But despite this, few people are aware of the phenomenal progress being made. Our Future is Biotech addresses this, explaining what biotech is, what is coming next, and how you might profit from it too.

Tech has been the most important theme for human progress for the last century. Biotech is next.

The book has been published by Hachette India.

Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol.

Andrew Craig is a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and founder of personal finance business Plain English Finance. His stated mission with the company is “to improve the financial affairs of as many people as possible”.

Andrew’s first book, How to Own the World, has been one of the top-selling personal finance books in the UK for several years, and currently enjoys thousands of reviews across Amazon, Audible and Goodreads. It has also been published in China, India and Vietnam.

Since founding Plain English Finance, Andrew has appeared in numerous national and specialist financial publications including: The Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, The Financial Times, The Mirror, City A.M., The Spectator, Shares and MoneyWeek magazines, YourMoney, This is Money and Money Observer. He has been interviewed on Sky Television, Bloomberg and Shares Radio, and was featured in Michael Winterbottom’s 2015 documentary-comedy The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Andrew began his finance career at SBC Warburg in the late 1990s. Since then, he has held various senior equity roles at leading investment banks, both in London and New York. In that time, Andrew has met with the senior management teams of well over one thousand companies and with hundreds of professional investors, and has regularly been involved in high-profile stock market transactions. These have included the Kingdom of Sweden’s sale of Nordea Bank AB in 2013 (totalling 7.6 billion dollars) and the stock market flotation of several dozen companies including the likes of easyJet, Burberry, Campari, Carluccio’s, the Carbon Trust and lastminute.

From January 2015 to June 2021, Andrew was a partner at an investment bank specializing in biotechnology and life sciences, WG Partners LLP.

Andrew lives in Hampshire, England, with his wife, Rachel, and their two small children, Ella and Oscar.

30 May 2025

“Waste Wars” by Alexander Clapp

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. The millions of tonnes of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars, cons and cover ups across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. And few people have any idea they’re happening.

Roaming across five continents, Alexander Clapp delves deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists in the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour. He reveals how most of our trash actually lives a secret second life, getting shipped, smuggled or dumped from one country onto another, with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world.

Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage has spawned a massive global black market, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. The book is published by Hachette India.

Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol.

Alexander Clapp is a journalist and writer based in Greece. His reporting has appeared in publications including Guardian Long Read, The New Republic, the New York Times, New Left Review, The Economist and The Baffler. Clapp is the recipient of numerous journalism awards. In 2017 he was named a Balkan Fellow for Journalist Excellence and won a European Union Migration Media Award. In 2018 he won a Matthew Power Literary Reporting Prize. In 2019 he won a Robert B. Silvers Reporting Grant. In 2021 he won a Pulitzer Center Breakthrough Journalism Award. His award-winning piece, “The Vampire Ship,” published in the September 2020 issue of The New Republic, has been optioned for a forthcoming documentary series.

30 May 2025

” A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. All of them have been published by Hachette India.

How do you even begin to describe a book that is gut wrenching, relevant, and absorbing to read? I read it more or less in one fell swoop, despite many false starts. It took a while to read the first few pages and get my bearing. But once I had figured it out, I just read and read and read. A Man with Two Faces is very moving, very thought-provoking and it truly helps decontstruct the concep of America as everyone seems to think that they know. It is told from the point of view of a Vietnamese refugee whose parents flee at the time of the Vietnam war. Viet Thanh Nguyen is fours-year-old. But he seems to carry within him the experience of being a Vietnamese and a successful American. He has broken many barriers by being accepted for who he is, his views, his writing, and his opinion pieces. He has been true to his identity and not allowed anyone to tell him otherwise. All the while he also recognises the intense sacrifices his parents made for the sake of their two sons. Both of whom ended up living the American dream, but at what cost. Their mother quite literally had had to be institutionalised not once, but twice, and finally passed away a woman trapped within herself. It is a heartbreaking account of her downward spiral. Yet, what is extraordinary is that her younger son, the writer, recognises with acute sensitivity what it takes for a woman to live many lives in one. He refers to her marriage at the age of seventeen as the first time she was a refugee when Vietnam was split into two and then the second time, when she fled Vietnam for the USA. Throughout the text, he is able to draw comparisons between the freedom she had in Vietnam, including earning her livelihood and being able to drive a car, but in the USA, she was handicapped by language and ultimately, her existence was circumscribed by the provision store that she ran with her husband and her domestic chores. It broke her, piece by piece.

There is much else in A Man of Two Faces. It is a combination of sophisticated criticism and a witnessing to modern events in the USA. Also, what it takes to be an immigrant.

The writing style at first is peculiar to engage with. But as one proceeds through the book it becomes fairly obvious that these were previously published essays that are now interspersed with present day commentaries and observations by the author. It makes for an interesting visual arrangement on the page, almost like literary art. At the same it, it is like the reader is privileged to be privy to a dialogue. Ultimately, it illustrates the very title of the book wherein the two faces of the author — the public and the private are in constant engagement with each other in the prose format. Fascinating!

Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol to coincide with the fifty years of the conclusion of the Vietnam War on 30 April 2025.

Here is the TOI Bookmark conversation on Spotify:

Read it and you wil not regret it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

26 May 2025

“The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life” by Rachel Clarke

The first of our organs to form, the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of all that makes us human: as long as it continues to beat, we hope.

One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max’s parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family.

This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira’s heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.

The Story of a Heart is a testament to compassion for the dying, the many ways we honour our loved ones, and the tenacity of love. It has been published by Hachette India.

Dr. Rachel Clarke won the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction 2025. Her book, Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life (published by Hachette India) is very well written and extremely moving in parts. She achieves a remarkable balance between telling the account of a heart transplant in two kids (for which one had to lose her life), changing the organ donation law in the UK, and sharing the history of heart transplants — it is fifty years since the South African cardiologist Christiaan Barnard conducted the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant operation.

It was a privilege speaking with Dr. Clarke on TOI Bookmark.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

I think the heart of good medicine and an essential requirement of every good doctor, is the ability to really listen to your patents, really care about them as human beings. Not just as somebody with a failing liver, failing heart. You need to care about human beings. You need to be curious about their life; their story and you need to attend very very closely to what they say. And actually, a lot of those are traits of a good writer as well and a good journalist, particularly a nonfiction writer.

Also, read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol.

Dr. Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and author of three London Sunday Times bestselling books, including Dear Life, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Prior to medical school, she worked as a broadcast journalist. She writes for many publications, including the New York Times, London Guardian, and the London Sunday Times, and she makes regular television and radio appearances on outlets including the BBC, among others.

23 May 2025

“The Book of Guilt” by Catherine Chidgey/ TOI Bookmark

This podcast was recorded at the beginning of 2025. Hence, the reference to the book being forthcoming. Now it has been released in various parts of the world. On 9 May 2025, Catherine wrote on Facebook that the New Zealand edition of The Book of Guilt was reprinted before it was even published! A dream come true for all writers.

We have had a fascinating range of guests on the weekly #TOIBookmark podcast. 124+ guests! The guests featured have been national and international authors including Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, & Padma Shri awardees, Nobel Laureates, Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, BAFTA awardees, diplomats, bestselling authors, debut writers, and legendary writers, across genres and languages. But the conversation was Catherine Chidgey was extra special. For years, I have been hearing about her incredible work and never got a chance to read her books. Thanks to the New Zealand High Commission to India, Bangladesh & Nepal I not only managed to read a pile of Catherine’s incredible novels but got to interview her as well. She has garnered a pile of awards over the years but has also generously given back to the literary community by instituting the Sargeson Prize for short stories in recognition of Frank Sargeson’s influence on New Zealand literature. At NZD 15,000, it is the country’s richest short story award.

Her debut In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book (1998) Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia/South Pacific,1999), as well as the Betty Trask Award (1999) in the UK. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize (1999). Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters (2002), the Katherine Mansfield Award (2013) and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize (2017). Her novel Remote Sympathy was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (both in 2022).

Her forthcoming novel “The Book of Guilt” (Hachette India) is a compelling work of dystopian fiction. It sparked two international bidding wars and is published in May 2025 by five different English-language publishers! John Murray (UK, in May), Hachette (US, in September), Knopf Canada (September), Penguin Random House Australia (May), Te Herenga Waka University Press (NZ, in May).

Catherine really explores the dark spaces in life, while seemingly not to. She does it well. In the conversation, she says that she really pushes herself hard. If anyone does that, then they squeeze the best out of themselves. It was such a pleasure to chat with “one of New Zealand’s greatest living writers” (Radio NZ).

Here is a snippet from our conversation:

“My life is very busy. So, I teach creative writing full time at the University of Waikato and we have a nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter and somehow around that I also seem to write full time. So the true answer is that I have no social life when I am in the generative phase of a novel rather than the late editing phase. I write first thing in the morning and I take my daughter to school and then I go into the university campus and then I come home and we have dinner and then we get our daughter to bed and then I write again. I do the evening shift. Morning and night, seven days a week. I am pretty hard on myself. I have a daily word count that I have to meet. There is no option of not meeting that. If I exceed it, which I most often do, it doesn’t mean that I get to go easy on myself the next day. The clock resets itself to zero and I have to start again. [Laughs]”

I highly recommend Catherine’s new novel. It is truly unforgettable. It has the incredible knack of popping up in one’s memory while reading other contemporary literature and discovering unexpected threads between the books. Utterly gorgeous!

18 May 2025

Web Analytics Made Easy -
StatCounter