At the book launch for Same Same, someone (it might have been me) asked book designer turned author Peter Mendelsund about the experience of designing his own book’s cover. He said he would not do it again (Alex Merto designed the cover of his next book). The reasons he gave were unsurprising and likely inevitable for any book designer turned author in a similar situation. As I was listening to his sage advice, I knew that if ever I was given the choice, I would most definitely be designing my own book cover. Now three years later, I have.

“I love you as high as the sky, and as deep as the ocean”, Kat Chow’s mother used to tell her and her sisters, quoting from the children’s book Owly. Originally titled As Deep as the Ocean, later renamed Seeing Ghosts, Chow’s memoir is about the matching depths of love and grief. For Chow, grief came too soon after love when at thirteen her mother died suddenly from cancer. What follows is the telling of a Chinese-American family mourning in the cracks between two cultures. It is ancestral rituals lost in translation for a child of immigrants and a loss that was never going to make sense in any language.

Sam Cohen’s debut short story collection, Sarahland, is a psychedelic plunge into the lives of characters called Sarah. We meet each Sarah at the battle line between their nebulous identity and the traditional roles society has set forth. There’s a story set in a Chinatown strip mall’s velvet painting museum, another in Ancient Egypt, another in a Midwestern college dorm. These genre-bending stories are superficially disparate, but bound in their attempt to relinquish confines imposed on the inner self and its relationship to the outer world. It’s a modern mythology.

As a reader, the verse novel is one of my favorites. Stanzaic and terse, syncopated and euphonic, a narrative told in verse entrances the reader with every line and silence; hence why I was thrilled when Unbound’s creative director Isobel Kieran briefed me Giles Paley-Phillips’ first adult book One Hundred and Fifty-Two Days. Written in a stream-of-consciousness free verse, the novel minutely follows a teenage boy’s vulnerability during his mother’s stint in the hospital.

I designed the cover of Juan José Millás’ From the Shadows knowing little of what the novel contained. I believe the manuscript was still being translated from Spanish and the publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, provided a short extract and invited my interpretation. It worked to my advantage that the text was as much a mystery to me as the protagonist was to the world he inhabited. 

Last summer I had the fortuitous experience of being briefed the same book by two publishers. First, the British publisher And Other Stories reached out to me, and then a few rounds into the cover design process, the American publisher Coffee House Press contacted me about designing the US edition. Having studied design in the UK, and now based in the US, I am quite comfortable adapting my style to suit the intended market, but I could not have foreseen the challenges that this unique case would pose.