A new life for Pi
Seven years, seven million copies and one Man Booker Prize-win later, Life of Pi is getting a makeover. In July, Canongate are bringing out a new edition of this modern classic, complete with a new cover, a new reading guide and a new life ahead of it – they tell us all about it.
One of the things that’s pretty challenging about re-issuing an oldie but goodie like Life of Pi is how to get everyone – booksellers, reviewers, the reading public – enthused about a new edition. So we set about looking at Life of Pi and its history in the UK and around the world – what is it about this book that’s still fresh, still relevant and consistently a great read?
The answer was right in front of our noses! The reason why people loved (and continue to love) Life of Pi, even after all these years, is that there’s so much to talk about in the book. So many questions are raised in the telling of Pi Patel’s tragic (or heroic) story, and Yann Martel draws the reader into the story chapter by chapter. And re-reading the book only adds more layers of meaning.
We’ve been involved with BookCrossing as an organisation since 2007, and we’ve held successful readalongs with many of our titles (Once Upon a Time in England being the latest). So why not organise a readalong of our own for Life of Pi, a book that we reckon has been a book group favourite since publication? With seven million copies sold around the world, we estimate that about six billion people haven’t read the book yet!
So we set about building a new readalong-supporting Life of Pi website – lifeofpi.co.uk. We’re still a month and a bit away from the official start, but you can see that we’ve already got readers from 30-plus countries signed up to read the book come August. Reading groups and bookshops in the UK can also get their hands on official Life of Pi readalong bookmarks and posters, as well as regular tips via the readalong newsletter that we slave over (no auto-generation goes into our content).
And with the support for the readalong coming from the Man Booker organisation, Pi’s publishers around the world, libraries around the country and reading groups (via bookgroup.info and individual groups who’ve signed up – yes, you can sign up as a group), we’re really hoping to get to at least some of the six billion, so they, too, can share their experience of Pi’s amazing story.
