Usually I’m drawn to single iconic objects rendered in an interesting or unexpected way to draw a reader in. This book spans time and continents and felt like so many things all at once; China’s Cultural Revolution, a young violist, a family separated, love and tragedy.

The author and editor agreed that the cover should somehow evoke the different narratives at play, while still feeling simple and beautiful. The author felt strongly that she wanted it to have a strong sense of time and place while not using cliche imagery to signal Chinese culture.

Literary speculative fiction is a genre that I love and one that I can also find to be a challenge. It’s very easy to lean too far into the fantastic elements of the piece which can make the package look too much like commercial sci-fi. This book is about marriage, capitalism, and a very human drama with the sci-fi elements being a farcical backdrop.

A lot of designers talk about the trouble of working on a cover for a book that they really like. For me, it’s usually that I’m trying too hard to represent all the complexities of the novel rather than focusing on a simple idea and executing it in an attractive way. This book had me going down a lot of wrong paths in trying to do it justice.

The story is an epic about two families who move to a town outside New York City. Without giving anything away, there is a tragedy and the characters spend the rest of the novel and many years reconciling this event. Thematically there’s a lot to unpack - issues of mental illness, the American suburban ideal, family, love, secrets, forgiveness… A lot.