Hachette launching Essentials modern classics series

Hachette is launching its first ever modern classics list for its international markets, featuring titles from Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Sarah Waters among others.

The publisher said Hachette Essentials, featuring fiction and non-fiction from 1950 onwards, was designed to compete with the likes of Vintage and Penguin Modern Classics. The first 11 titles will be launched on 4th July with major marketing campaigns in Australia, Ireland, India and New Zealand, plus Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Further titles are planned for 2020.

The initial launch list features The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally and If This is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi.

Also on the list are Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

Keneally said: ‘‘I am delighted to be mentioned within a bull’s roar of the magical word ‘classic’.”

The jackets have all been designed by Australian artist and designer Josh Durham, featuring spines in the same blue that runs through the river mural at Hachette UK’s headquarters, Carmelite House in London.

Hachette Australia m.d, Justin Ratcliffe said: “It has been a joy to work on this project with my international collegues and this absolutely stellar list of authors and books.  If you are curious, engaged, hungry for experience and alive to the possibilities of literature, with all its questions and complexities, challenges and provocations, shocks and comforts, terrors and joys – then these are the books for you.  They will make you feel and they will make you think. They might just change your life.”