My novel has a face! Well, two, actually...

Since it’s now up on both the Anansi website as well as on Amazon,  I think I’m allowed to share it:

The cover for my novel!

I can’t tell you who designed it (because I don’t know), but I think they’ve done a lovely job.  I worried, at first, that it doesn’t look very literary as a title, but it’s what’s inside that will have to carry that weight, anyway. 

I’ve always claimed to prefer covers without faces on them because I feel that they overdetermine things somehow, but these faces – well, these faces are pretty amazing.  They don’t look exactly how I imagined the sisters Beena and Sadhana Singh in the novel, but it’s pretty close, especially their expressions and the complex way they’re looking at each other.  If readers end up picturing them this way, that’s just fine.  And don’t you find that even when there’s a close-up photo or a drawing on the front of the book, characters always take on a life of their own inside your head, anyway?   I know exactly what Sara Crewe, Harry Potter, Esther Summerson, Fanny Price, and Emily Starr really look like…outside of illustrations, film or television adaptations….or I feel like I do!

It’s pretty surreal to see something you’ve invented start to take a physical shape in the world.  And eerie, too, to think of all the hours and hours (and years and years) I’ve spent working on it distilled into a single image that people will see (if I’m lucky) in the 11 seconds it apparently takes to make them decide whether or not to pick it up in the bookstore.