World Book Night 2012 was celebrated in the UK, Ireland, Germany and USA on April 23, which is a symbolic date for world literature; it is the birth and death anniversary of Shakespeare, as well as the death anniversary of Cervantes, the great Spanish novelist. The day is marked to celebrate reading and thousands of volunteers gift books in their communities to share their love of books.

This year, about 1 million books were set to be given away in the UK by 20,000 book lovers. Volunteers ranged from actors, screenwriters, authors, playwrights to television presenters. Stephen Fry, who was among the volunteers, decided to give out Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities while fiction writer Alexander McCall Smith chose Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

According to the organisation, the World Book Night aims to “reach out to those who don’t regularly read by using passionate book lovers around the country to become reading ambassadors and to do just that within their communities, book by book, reader by reader, hand to hand, getting the whole country reading.”

In addition, World Book Night will be giving a further 620,000 books over the course of the year directly to the hardest to reach readers through prisons, care homes, hospitals, sheltered housing, homeless shelters, libraries and through other partner charities.

Twenty five titles were chosen by a committee comprising librarians, booksellers, authors and the media and printed in World Book Night editions. Below are some of the selected titles.