Kaavya Viswanathan's book withdrawn from Indian bookstores

New Delhi, Apr 28 (UNI) Indian-American teenager Kaavya Viswanathan's controversial best-selling first book 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life', which faces charges of plagiarism, was today withdrawn from Indian bookshops.

The book's publisher Little, Brown Company, UK has communicated tonight that the copies of the book should be withdrawn from Indian bookstores, Penguin India CEO and President Thomas Abraham told UNI.

''We have been told that the book should be withdrawn. We will inform the retailers on Monday,'' said Mr Abraham.

The book, which has fetched Viswanathan a 500,000 dollar advance, had been earlier withdrawn by Little Brown in the United States where the author is a Harvard undergraduate.

Penguin, which has sold 15,000 copies in India, will ask the retailers to return the copies, Mr Abraham said.

It will be a week before all the copies are withdrawn from the bookstores, he added.

Little Brown has also decided to withdraw the book from other Asian countries including Singapore.

Viswanathan has been charged with lifting portions from American author Megan McCafferty's 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings'.

Viswanathan has apologised for unintentionally using sections from McCafferty's works, but said the ideas in her book are entirely different.

The film rights of 'How Opal Mehta...' has been sold to the DreamWorks studio in Hollywood.

McCafferty and her publisher had rejected the apologies saying there were too many instances of plagiarism to consider it as unintentional.

UNI FZ LS BD2015