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What are they thinking?

I read and loved the YA novel A Brief History of Montmaray and a main motivation in buying the book was it’s lovely cover that captured something of a love of reading and the solitariness and yearning for freedom of teenagehood. Imagine my horror when I saw the sequel in my local bookshop – The FitzOsbornes in Exile. Okay I haven’t read this sequel yet but the cover looks like something for a non-fiction book. The post next to the girl looks like some sort of farm implement and her hunched-over pose suggests she’s exhausted (the book description says “Sophie’s dreams of making her debut in shimmering ballgowns …” hmm nothing about toiling on a farm!). The publishers have also rebadged the first book to have the same look. This effort is a bit better. At least it has our heroine looking out over the sea but it’s still not a patch on the original cover.

The same thing has happened to The Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zinks. The first cover was evocative and caught my eye and luckily the tale was as spooky as the cover. Now they have rebadged this book to be in keeping with the sequel Guardian of the Gate. These later covers are just ghastly. I refuse to read anything with a cover like that which is a pity because I’d really like to read the sequel. I’m sure the publishers are attempting to position these books in the vampire/zombie/horror teen fiction market when Zinks’ books are much better than that and have cross-over potential.

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The Last Brother

I’d like share the lovely cover for Nathacha Appanah’s novel The last Brother. Appanah is from Mauritius but now lives and writes in France. The Last Brother is a tale of the friendship of two boys: Raj, a native of Mauritius, and David a young Jewish boy incarcerated on the island after a group of refugees fleeing Europe in 1945 are interned there. Appanah beautifully evokes the lushness of the island but also the harshness of life for both of the boys. The story is framed by the older Raj who looks back with guilt on what occurred on the island. There is poignancy in the portrait of Raj as a boy, not quite aware of what is going on, and who is the victim of a violent father. But I never bought his love for David whom he befriends when he spends time in the prison hospital (Raj’s father works as a prison guard). David is never a fully realised character – his main attribute being his blonde fly-away hair and uncoordinated body. Appanah suggests that David is a substitute brother to Raj after Raj’s other brothers are killed in a flash flood (hence David is really the “last brother”) but I thought the relationship was forced. Nevertheless this is a short, fable-like book, and gives a rich sense of another life. I bought the book on the strength of the wonderfully evocative dust jacket which I’ve framed. Does that count as vandalism against a book? It still has the underneath plain green hard cover …

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Oranges are the fruit

At least for Barbara Kingsolver whose latest novel The Lacuna has won the 2010 Orange Prize for fiction by women. The prize is awarded to “the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English”.

The prize website says “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world” are the criteria and the winner receives £30,000.

The judges say they chose The Lacuna because “it is a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy.”

As I recall the reviews of The Lacuna were not wholeheartedly favourable with the Guardian’s reviewer Alice O’Keeffe being typical. She writes the “lack of a convincing narrator leaves The Lacuna rather rootless. While The Poisonwood Bible was equally ambitious in scope, it kept its focus small and tight… in The Lacuna, Kingsolver allows history to dictate the characters, rather than the other way around”.

Obviously the Orange Prize judges disagreed.

Like a lot of other readers, I loved The Poisonwood Bible which is set in the Congo. It is consistently up there on the “favourite reads” lists but something about the hotchpotch nature of The Lacuna and the device of gaps in knowledge and the use of notebooks turned me off.

I also doggedly tried to read Kingsolver’s last non-fiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about her family trying to survive on only locally produced food and goods in rural Virginia. Books about making do under constraints I love but something about the hokey Americanism, the one-big-happy-familyness, forced me to give up before I was half way through.

I quite like the cover for The Lacuna but what does it signify? It reminded me of the cover for Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (which I didn’t like – the cover, I enjoyed the book) with its entwining flowers, leaves and vines. Perhaps these author’s names sell their books alone and any obvious representational graphic on the cover would only get in the way??

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Review – Of Bees and Mist

This is a truly strange book – compulsively readable and annoying in equal measure. The cover is a bit of a giveaway consisting as it does of the title in big art deco letters on a grey background with a few white curlicues ie we’ve got no idea how to classify this. Just above the author’s name is a small picturebook-like silhouette of a tower on a cloud with a windswept woman’s figure. The publisher is tentatively suggesting this might be a kid’s fantasy.

This could be a fantasy book except it is set in a picturebook ‘real world’, in a city that might be northern European, central European or Asian; it has elements of each. It could be in medieval times, the nineteenth century or contemporary times. The clothes don’t help. In one place the heroine, Meridia, wears a knee length dress, yet her father wears a top hat and cloak. Everyone walks – there are no horses, or cars, or trains. In the gardens there are roses and marigolds but also bougainvillea, the food is cakes and sandwiches but also ginger and garlic and noodles. If we accept this hybrid world it is only one step further to accept that there are yellow and blue mists that enfold Meridia’s father when he leaves the house, that the house is perpetually freezing no matter the heat outside, and that Meridia’s mother-in-law dominates her family with vicious attacking bees that aren’t visible to others.

In Meridia’s world there are fortune tellers, invisible friends and people who fade into their spirit beings but there’s also school, romance and marriage, housekeeping and starting up a business. This mishmash of elements would be fatally off putting if it wasn’t for the strong narrative drive and the barrage of mysteries to be resolved. Meridia’s mother-in-law is a truly horrendous character, such a narcissistic sociopath that she doesn’t really need the (supernatural) bees the author bestows on her to perpetuate her horrors. Be warned, her comeuppance is a long-time coming.

The novel has been called magic realism, but it doesn’t quite fit that description, also an adult fairytale. That tag doesn’t really fit either but is closer to the mark. There are sexual references and crudity of language that mark this out as ‘adult’ whereas the story itself could be young adult, or teen. Perhaps as the phenomenon of Harry Potter showed, adults do want to read young fantasy books, and Of Bees and Mist has tapped into this. Interestingly, however, they’ve marketed the novel as general fiction, not fantasy.

I found it unsettling: I thought Meridia a little too self-satisfied, her husband a dolt, the feud between Meridia’s parents unbelievable and the fate of many characters unfair but, bloody hell, I couldn’t stop reading until I’d bolted through to the end.

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APA book design winners

Best designed literary fiction book was Valley of Grace (by Marion Halligan) and best designed fiction cover was Ransom by David Malouf. See previous post under ‘book covers’ category for the shortlist.

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National pride covered

An article in the UK Guardian newspaper (reprinted from the Observer) by Tom Lamont looks at why books published in different countries have different covers. Any search through Amazon comparing the versions on offer to the Australian book will illustrate this phenomenon. Call me nationalist but I usually like the Australian versions, especially when compared to the US.

The Observer article quotes Julian Humphries, head cover designer at Fourth Estate, as saying, “Different sales channels have different sensibilities. It’s a cultural thing as taste-driven as different countries eating different things for breakfast”. Lamont goes on to say that literary fiction is easier to sell in mainland Europe than in the UK or the US, so publishers in Europe can be “less overt in their attempts to grab the attention of customers.” Hence covers with simple images and plain type. Nathan Burton, a UK designer, says, “The UK book market is more competitive, all the covers in shops shouting: ‘Buy me!’ We have to put on a bit of extra spin.” The US, they say, “signposts its literary fiction more than the UK” and the article compares the covers of Wolf Hall in the UK and US. The US one is more historical and apparently has won awards. Burton says he doesn’t like to look at other cover versions of a book when working on a cover – “It’s always best to work from fresh”. Lamont wonders whether the need for differences between countries really amounts to little more than national pride. Or more likely local publishers insisting that they know their own market better than their OS HQs do. See the original article here.

Clockwise from top left Wolf Hall Canadian edition, UK and Australian paperback, UK hard cover/Australian trade paperback and US version.

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Dying different ways

The covers for Debra Adelaide’s (Australian) novel The Household Guide to Dying for different editions shows a variety of approaches and the difficulty in marketing a book that is, at once, about dying, a spoof on self-help “guides”, an exploration of the value of relationships and of loss, and about the joys of domesticity. Of all the covers I like the UK edition (left) best, it’s colouful, arty and suitably mysterious. The first Australian cover was mysterious, but in an irritating way. There’s that sombe grey/blue and a see-through teapot with a steam heart coming out of it (below left). The second Australian edition is a little better, capturing the domestic angle, and the design is neat and attractive (below right). I have no idea what the Americans were thinking with the hardcover edition there: it is very severe and has a non-fiction look about it (bottom left). As if to compensate for this they’ve gone too far in the opposite direction with the paperback version – a dinky, jaunty, twee, Maeve Binchy look suggesting the book is much, much more lightweight than it is. The novel might have an ironic voice but it has a serious intent.
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Heads and legs

Headless in history (see also “Females sans heads” under “book covers” category)

A coincidence? These covers look very similar:

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But a cover I love is …

The image of Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight is from a work by Victorian photo-artist Samantha Everton. Vogue Living describes her work as: Everton now shoots her magic realist worlds while approaching her art as a director might visualise a theatrical film set. The images slide the viewer into a hyper-real colour-saturated world.

Beautiful.

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APA book design awards

The shortlist in the Best Designed Literary Fiction Book category includes: (Plus The China Garden see previous post)

For general fiction best book design are (plus American Rust which I’m not incuding):

A True History of the Hula Hoop, Ransom and Valley of Grace are the fiction finalists for Best Designed Cover.

I think the Andrew McGahan cover is lovely and I also like Good to a Fault which stands out in the bookshop but I can see Ransom has a wonderful simplicity as does The China Garden. We await the results!