A cover at last

The cover

On this late August morning I am in the thick of copy editing and formatting, but it looks as if the cover is nearly finished. The actual colours are more dramatic, warmer and brighter than the picture I'm posting here, but having a professional cover at last certainly does make Transgressions seem like a real book.
 
Covers are a challenge, I've discovered: one wants to get the balance right between simplicity and complexity, between attraction and accuracy. Italy as simultaneously a physical place and an idea-- partly memory, partly an idealized elsewhere-- feels like the right landscape to me, although the novel is also set in London and Paris as well as (somewhat more prosaically) in Pennsylvania and Portsmouth. The poppy also seems right: it's mentioned several times in the novel and hints at the highly sexualized language of flowers used by the two central characters; of course, it also suggests the first World War, an event that looms inevitably over their poetic world.

I am very grateful to Austin Nevin and Serena Martucci di Scarfizzi for their enthusiastic help with the images and design.