The cover of Mercy House features an angel door knocker hung on a red door, with a woman’s hand reaching for it. In the book, the angel is Mercy House’s identifying feature, signaling to victims of domestic violence that they’ve arrived at safety. Quite early in her process, designer Elsie Lyons came across a similar image, of a red door with woman’s reaching for a knocker. “At the time, I thought it might be too straightforward,” she told Spine. And so she passed.

Lucia Macro, executive editor for William Morrow/Avon Books, knew she wanted Alena Dillon’s debut novel Mercy House “the moment it landed on my desk.” For her, the decision to take on a book is often about the voice. “I respond to strong voices in the books I love, both from the characters and the author, and Mercy House delivered.”

William Morrow released Mercy House on February 11. For this edition of Beginning to End, Spine follows Mercy House from author all the way through to publicity and marketing, stopping along the way to talk to Alena Dillon’s agent and editor, as well as the book’s designer. We began with the author, and now arrive at her agent, Nicki Richesin.

Mercy House, Alena Dillon’s debut novel, centers on Sister Evelyn, a fierce, wise-cracking, and ultimately kind-hearted nun who helps run a small Brooklyn shelter for women fleeing from domestic violence. When Bishop Hawkins threatens to close the home, Evelyn fights to save Mercy House and protect its residents, a struggle which forces her to face abuse in her own past.

Dina Nayeri’s first two books, the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea and Refuge, pulled in threads from her life; her Iranian childhood, her time as a refugee in Italy, her settling in America. The second book in particular flowed from mind to pen, from pen to page. “It just fell out of me,” Nayeri said. Only when she arrived at her latest book and first work of nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, did Nayeri really grapple with what to say, and how. 

Meng Jin’s debut novel, Little Gods, utilizes a network of characters and their lives to tell the story of Su Lan, a physicist who is forever changed after giving birth to a daughter in Beijing on the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Through the eyes of her daughter, husband, and a neighbor, the complexity of Su Lan and her experiences are revealed.

In The Tenth Muse, by Catherine Chung, aged renowned mathematician Katherine, who’s on the precipice of a new mathematical discovery, muses over the details of her fascinating life. A woman of profound inner strength, she surmounts professional obstacles, betrayals, and treks the entire world to solve her own personal mystery.

Adharanand Finn initially set out to complete an assignment about ultramarathons for The Guardian. What happened next involved a two-year journey comprised of hundreds of miles captured not in an article, but in a book, The Rise of the Ultra Runners: A Journey to the Edge of Human Endurance. 

When Alisha Gorder arrived at the end of Hard Mouth, Amanda Goldblatt’s debut adventure novel about a woman struggling to face her father’s slow dying, she “immediately texted [Counterpoint Press] editor Jenny Alton in all caps, and with more crying emojis than words. I was devastated by the ending,” she told Spine. “And also that the book was over.”

For this bonus episode host Hiba Tahir interviews celebrated writer, illustrator, and poet, Jasmin Kaur. They discuss her debut poetry and prose collection, When You Ask Me Where I’m Going, published by HarperCollins.

Readers of As Good As The First Time (Dafina 2018) fell in love with Sugar Lake, the small Georgia town at the heart of K.M. Jackson’s Sugar Lake series. Fell in love, and then arrived at the last page and had to leave. Nearly a year, they waited before they could return to Sugar Lake, and to Aunt Joyce’s bakeshop, Goode ‘N Sweet. Nearly a year since they met New Yorkers Alexandrea and Olivia Gale, come south to help Aunt Joyce and, in Olivia’s case, to get pulled back into a relationship she’d left behind years ago.

Adrienne Brodeur’s debut memoir Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me tells the story of the affair the author’s mother Malabar had with a close family friend. Early on, she drew her daughter, Brodeur, into the subterfuge, a conspiracy which lasted years and had long-lasting effects on Brodeur.

The memoir was bid on by fourteen U.S. publishers in a heated auction, with foreign rights sold in numerous countries. Entertainment Weekly called it a “twisted mother-daughter story” that “could be the next big memoir.” Film rights were preemptively bought by Chernin Entertainment, with Kelly Fremon Craig, director of “The Edge of Seventeen,” set to direct.

Erin Williams’ graphic novel Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame (Abrams ComicArts, October 8, 2019) gives an inside look at her past sexual experiences while offering an analysis of the way society looks at, and interacts with, women. Her cover, which features a woman wearing only a t-shirt and underwear standing on a platform in front of a crowded train, invites readers to explore the content within and holds meaning to Williams.

“Every project feels like the first time,” says designer Alban Fischer, despite having designed over 300 covers in his career. Before the full translation of Sara Mesa’s novel, Four by Four, was even complete Fischer knew “it was right up my alley.”

Poet and writer Hanif Abdurraqib strives to pursue whatever curiosities are in his mind when he sits down to write. The end result this time around is his latest poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, exploring grief, change, heartbreak, history, and moving forward. Fortune, out this month from Tin House Books, is his second poetry collection, following 2016’s The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. 

In Mistress of the Ritz, Melanie Benjamin’s most recent novel (May, Delacorte Press), Benjamin takes one of the most popular and captivating eras for historians, both professional and amateur, World War II, and shines a light on two individuals who remained in the shadows: Blanche and Claude Auzello. As caretakers of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, hub of elegance and glamour, they had the awesome responsibility of keeping face for the Nazis while plotting subterfuge.

In recent years, Peter Mendelsund has been shifting his career from designing books to writing them. The former Associate Art Director of Alfred A. Knopf already has a couple of non-fiction titles to his name – What We See When We Read and Cover, with another, The Look of the Book, on the way – and has now stepped into fiction with Same Same, a twisting metafictional meditation on creativity. We asked him a few questions about this latest adventure between the covers.

Dr. Aysha Akhtar made her first foray into non-academic writing with Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies (Pegasus Books, May 2019). Throughout her book, Dr. Akhtar weaves stories of interactions between humans and animals with science, human experience, and social history to draw assertions about the connection between humans and animals: how we interact, develop empathy from, and benefit from relationships with animals. 

Released in April, Meg Elison's The Book of Flora (47North) wraps up her The Road to Nowhere trilogy. The post-plague society depicted in the book disrupts stereotypes of gender and sexual intimacy, and introduces new concepts of "normal" and hope for the future. Rife with gender fluidity, queer acknowledgement, and political undertones, The Book of Flora is, as Elison told Spine, “a call to action.” 

Poet January Gill O’Neil, author of the fall 2018 release Rewilding, might not believe that poetry is ever necessarily on the side of power— but she does equate the two.

“Poetry is power,” O’Neil insists. “Making the choice to sit down and write or read a poem is power. It’s a choice. It’s self-care. It’s the start of a revolution. It’s change. Like a photo, a poem captures a moment. And that is powerful.” 

The Cave Canem fellow has been published widely to much critical acclaim, including in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and Ecotone, among others. In 2018, she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and from 2012-2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Beginning to End is a series from Spine following a book from writing through acquisition, design and on to publication and publicity. For our second "season," we're looking at Hard Mouth, Amanda Goldblatt's debut adventure novel about a woman facing—and sometimes fleeing from—her father's drawn-out battle with cancer. Counterpoint Press publishes the book this month. We begin the series by talking with Goldblatt.

Set nearly a decade after Amberlough, after Cyril DePaul tipped over the first domino that led to the rise of a brutal fascist government—and five years since Armistice, since violent resistance to that government began in earnest—Amnesty, the conclusion to Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough Dossier, answers an often-ignored question: What happens once the revolution is over?

When she was accepted to a California writers' workshop in 2004, author Devi Laskar wanted to dust off an old short story she had written about arranged marriage. However, a good friend from graduate school, who was also attending, insisted she write something new. 

“So I wrote a family story about a woman and her kids and her dog,” Laskar explained. “I was torn between my love for The House on Mango Street — and my desire to emulate it — and my years of training as a reporter.”