India’s favourite book in 2014 involved a girlfriend, but not one that Chetan Bhagat had anything to do with.
Instead, prolific crime fiction writer Surendra Mohan Pathak’s Hindi novel Colaba Conspiracy—revolving around an expert lock picker and his ex-girlfriend—beat Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend to emerge as the highest voted book in an online year-end reader’s poll conducted by Amazon $AMZN India.
Amazon India’s 2014 Reading Trends poll took place over 10 days from Dec. 26 to Jan. 5, where more than 25,000 respondents voted for their favourite books in six different genres—Indian writing, biographies, literature and fiction, children’s and young adult, business and economics and politics and history.
Indian authors Sudeep Nagarkar’s Sorry, You’re Not My Type and Durjoy Dutta’s When Only Love Remains got the second and the third highest numbers of votes, respectively. Bhagat’s latest novel, amid controversies and legal notices for plagiarism, was fourth on the reader’s poll.
Among biographies, And Then One Day: A Memoir by Naseerudin Shah was more popular than Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way. Among business books, Nikhil Inamdar’s Rokda: How Baniyas Do Business lead the way, while the most voted book in the politics category was The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh by policy analyst Sanjaya Baru.
Apart from the reader’s poll, Amazon also ranked cities that read the most in 2014 based on all the orders received on its online bookstore in the year.
The reading trends report found Delhi as the most well-read city, followed by Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune.
On the basis of online orders on its website, the survey revealed the list of top 10 bestsellers in 2014. Bhagat’s latest novel sold the maximum number of copies in India in 2014. The rest of the highest selling books last year were:
