World Book Night: The 1,000,000 Book Giveaway

Twenty thousand avid readers across Ireland and the U.K. will give out a million books on the evening of Saturday, March 5th, in what is being billed by organizers as “the largest book give-away ever attempted.” World Book Night, as the event has been called, will come two days after World Book Day, a UNESCO-backed international celebration of books that takes place each year in more than a hundred countries.

Chosen by an independent editorial committee, the 25 titles have been picked from a poll of favorite books from across the book industry. The final selection offers a wide array of outstanding books encompassing all types of fiction: historical, literary, young adult, crime, as well as poetry, history and memoir.

Book-Givers
An army of 20,000 volunteers will give away most of the one million books on World Book Night. The book-giver application asks three main questions:

1. Which book from the 25 selections would you most like to give?
2. Why have you chosen this book?
3. Who would you give your copies to?

The Books
Here are the 25 book selections chosen for World Book Night:

A Fine Balance	A Life Like Other People's	Agent Zigzag
All Quiet on the Western Front	Beloved	Case Histories
Cloud Atlas	Dissolution	FingerSmith
Half of a Yellow Sun	Killing Floor	Life of Pi
Love in the Time of Cholera	Northern Lights	One Day
Rachel's Holiday	New Selected Poems	Stuart
The Blind Assassin	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Reluctant Fundamentalist	The Spy Who Came In from the Cold	The World's Wife
Toast