Posted on

Cherry blossom in Zimbabwe

Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly was published April 2009 in the UK and was available here from Allen and Unwin in paperback C format with the same cover. The book won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award and is available here now in paperback B format.

But compare the two covers. I picked up the book under the first cover in a bookshop thinking that it was set in the either China or Japan — the stylised trees looking like cherry blossom in snow and the red patch of sun is very Japanese — only to be confused by the description of the stories on the back cover. The second cover places the book firmly in Africa from where, indeed the author comes. Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer now living and working in Geneva and An Elegy for Easterly is a book of short stories set in Zimbabwe.

Going to Petina’s blog I now realise the row of trees on the first cover is an avenue of beautiful Jacarandas.

Here’s what Petina says on her blog about the new cover: “Here is the cover of the paperback version of “An Elegy for Easterly”. I love it in a million different ways. Thanks to the support of all my readers, we are approaching the end of the print run for the trade paperback (that’s the Jacaranda trees cover), just in time for the launch of this paperback, which goes on sale on 7 January 2010”.

Posted on

Females sans heads

What is it with girls and women without heads and book covers? Is it because a face is too specific and can thus be off-putting to a reader, legs or a torso being generic and therefore acceptable? Never mind what feminsim has argued about the objectifying of women and girls. Another reason might be that designers think parts of bodies can be arranged into more pleasing designs.

Posted on

Fugitive Blue

I just finished first time novelist Claire Thomas’ novel Fugitive Blue and it struck me how close in structure it was to Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. Claire Thomas’ book was promoted quite heavily by Allen&Unwin when it first came out in 2008 but sales, I think, were disappointing. Could this be because of the wishy-washy cover? It shows no hint that this is essentially a historical novel but suggests it is some high brow literary affair on the nature of art. Compare this to the cover for Brooks’ immensely popular People of the Book. There is immediately human interest, the marks of age and the clues the protagonist finds in the ancient text she is restoring (insect wing, a strand of hair).

Fortuitously I went to Claire Thomas’ website and found that A&U are reissuing FB in paperback B format this year and guess what? They’ve changed the cover. This one is better. At least we have an image of a woman (possibly supposed to be the narrator or the 15th century painter of the panel she is restoring) even if we only get her back view but the colour is still insipid. In the novel the colour in question is ultramarine, originally made from crushed lapis-lazuli, which I thought was a darker blue but I could stand corrected on that.