Hachette India is the Indian arm of Hachette UK, which is made up of companies like Hodder & Stoughton, Headline, John Murray Press, Quercus, Little, Brown, Orion, Hachette Children’s Books and Octopus, with legendary and award-winning imprints like John Murray, Gollancz, Orbit, Hodder, Maclehose Press, Virago, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, etc., and bestselling authors, and brands like Enid Blyton, J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Stephen Hawking, Venki Ramakrishnan, Donna Tartt, Malala Yousafzai, Sachin Tendulkar, John Grisham, Stephen King, Asterix, Shantaram, Nicholas Sparks, Mitch Albom, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Gaiman, Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Leigh Bardugo, Trevor Noah, Philip K. Dick, Rebecca Yarros, Michael Connelly, Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Perry, Frank Herbert, Quentin Tarantino, and Keigo Higashino. Hachette India also began its local publishing programme in May 2009 with Amit Varma’s My Friend Sancho, the highest selling fiction debut of the year. The Children’s books division got off to a great start as well with the bestselling The Mahatma and the Monkeys. Hachette India publishes a wide array of books ranging from general, literary and commercial fiction, children’s and reference books – like the country’s first Yearbook and Limca Book of Records– as well as non-fiction, covering memoirs, self-help, travel, history, business, popular culture, lifestyle and sports. Over the years, a spate of bestselling and critically acclaimed authors have been published including Indra Nooyi, Viswanathan Anand, Roopa Pai, Anuradha Roy, Shehan Karunatilaka, Rana Safvi, Manjula Padmanabhan, S.B. Divya, Chefs Manish Mehrotra and Ritu Dalmia, Mridula Ramesh, Rasheed Kidwai, Tavleen Singh, Shinie Antony, Bora Chung, Na. Parthasarathy, Chaman Nahal, Nanak Singh, Archana Garodia Gupta, Vivek Menon, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Zai Whitaker, Payal Kapadia, and Mallika Ravikumar, to name a few. Hachette UK is a part of Hachette Livre France, the dominant market leading publisher in France. The Hachette group is itself owned by the Lagardere group.