U.K. publisher Canongate is launching Black Thorn, a new crime fiction imprint. The list will feature titles acquired from Severn House, the publisher Canongate bought in September 2017. Severn House was founded in 1974 as a specialist fiction publisher focusing on the U.K. and U.S. library markets.
Black Thorn will release two books per month, starting in May next year. The first will be be Catherine O’Connell’s The Last Night Out, and The Savage Shore by David Hewson, author of The Killing trilogy. In all, 14 books will be published by Black Thorn in 2019, including Caro Ramsay’s The Suffering of Strangers, Simon Brett’s The Liar in the Library, Patricia MacDonald’s The Girl in the Woods, Glenn Cooper’s Sign of the Cross and Paul Doherty’s Dark Queen Rising.
“The authors on the Black Thorn list are crime writing veterans and their experience shows in the quality of their stories,” said Holly Domney, publishing coordinator for the imprint.
Of the move into commercial genre publishing, Canongate publisher Jamie Byng said in a statement: “When we were assessing Severn House as a possible acquisition, one of the many exciting opportunities that we felt it offered was the launch of a commercial fiction paperback list, drawing from Severn House’s outstanding roster of books and authors. So I am thrilled that we are now able to share our plans for Black Thorn which we believe is going to be a great success and which adds a distinctive new strand to Canongate’s publishing output.”
