I laid all twelve books face up on a long table in our office and walked away for an hour. When I came back, I made myself note which covers I saw first from the doorway, the way a customer meets a book, half distracted and looking for a reason to stop.
Three covers reached me before I was through the door. Two more got me once I was standing over the table. The rest asked for patience, and a few of them deserved it.
A debut cover carries more weight than most. The image and the type have to do nearly all the work. "With a first book the cover is the author's handshake," said Lena Marchetti, who designed Low Tide Protocol for Northwater Books. "Nobody knows the name yet. They only know whether the grip was firm."
The Favorites
Low Tide Protocol. Marchetti's cover is the loudest book of the season, and I mean that as praise. A black and white photograph of waves breaking over dark rock fills the frame, and across it the title runs in huge condensed type, red and white, stacked so tight the letters nearly touch. It looks like a warning sign bolted to a seawall. For a thriller about an evacuation plan designed to fail, that is exactly the right note.
"I wanted it to feel like an emergency broadcast," Marchetti said. "The ocean is gray. The only color is the alarm."
Orbit of the Lesser Moons. Farlight's cover, by Tobin Aske, is the quietest of my favorites and maybe the best. A full moon hangs on a field of pure black, and two small birds cross in front of it, one slightly higher than the other. There is no spaceship, no station, no planet. The image does what the novel does. It finds company in a very empty place.
"Every early sketch had hardware in it," Aske said. "Then I read the letters in the book again and took all the hardware out. It's a book about two people who never meet. The birds are them."
Fieldwork. Hannah Birch's essays got a cover as plain and sturdy as a fence post. Wyn Callaway's design for Common Ground uses a single black and white photograph of a hay bale in a stubble field, with the title set in tall condensed letters that echo the stalks. It also looks like nothing else on the nonfiction table.
The Salt Orchard. Harbor Light's cover, by Adeline Moss, is the most traditional of my favorites. A bare tree stands against a sunset, the title sits in a clean white serif and the words "A Novel" appear beneath it. It could have been generic. It isn't, because the tree is plainly dying, and once you know the book is about seawater creeping into an orchard, the lovely sky starts to look like a last light.
"Every early sketch had hardware in it. Then I read the letters in the book again and took all the hardware out."
Strong, With Reservations
Nine Lamps Over Kettle Street shows a single glowing oil lamp with the title in a cream italic serif. It is warm and handsome. My only complaint is that the lamp could belong to any historical novel. The street itself, which is the book's real subject, never appears.
A Grammar of Small Birds puts a blue tit on a branch above a cream title box. The bird is photographed with real tenderness, and the box gives the long title room to breathe. It is lovely. It is also the cover I expected, and Tomasz Wren's poems are stranger and better than expected.
Ledger of Quiet Things uses a black and white photograph of coffee cups, which fits a novel written in the hour before work. Designer Nadia Keel told me the cups were her own, photographed on her kitchen counter at 5:30 a.m. I admire the restraint, though from across a room it reads as a café menu more than a novel.
Iron & Honey shows a bee on a flower with the title in gold serif, a smart choice for a book about royal hives. For a 496-page fantasy with a kingdom's worth of politics, though, the image feels small.
The Undertow Club sets a heavy black serif over a black and white surf photograph. It is also the second black and white ocean cover on this list, and Low Tide Protocol simply does it with more nerve.
Softer Choices
Glasshouse Summer puts pink tulips beneath a script-like italic title. Romance covers speak their own language, and this one is fluent in it. I wish the greenhouse, the heart of the book, had made it onto the jacket.
What the River Kept, Delia Montrose's self-published memoir, got a new cover for its later printings. The current design, by an Alton designer named Carla Weems, sets an aerial photograph of a winding river above a cream panel holding the title. It is dignified and well made.
The Last Good Summer on Arden Lane shows a sepia photograph of a Volkswagen Beetle. The car is the right car, and the sepia tells you the year before the flap copy does. But sepia is a shortcut to nostalgia, and Colin Mercer's novel is tougher than its cover lets on.
The Verdict
The best covers this season make one decision and commit to it. A red headline, a black sky, a bale of hay. The weaker ones are not bad. They are polite.
"The risk with a first book is that everyone gets nervous and plays it safe," Aske said. "But a safe cover on an unknown book is just a book nobody sees."
The Salt Orchard by Mara Ellison (Harbor Light Press, 336 pages, $27), Low Tide Protocol by Priya Venkataraman (Northwater Books, 368 pages, $29), Orbit of the Lesser Moons by Kai Nakamura-Holt (Farlight, 384 pages, $28) and Fieldwork by Hannah Birch (Common Ground, 224 pages, $18) are out now.
Critic. Elena writes reviews and essays on poetry, memoir and the craft of the first book.
