It’s late on a Saturday night and I’m gazing at the new cover designs for Daughter of Smoke & Bone and Days of Blood & Starlight, trying to imagine I’m a shopper who’s never heard of these books before. It’s an impossible exercise. These books are stamped on my brain. Because of the way I write (my unhealthy perfectionist tendencies leading me to compulsively reread every word dozens of times), I practically have them memorized. But these covers are so different from all of the other editions that I do get glimmers of the magic of an unknown book.
I love these covers.
The settings of Prague and Morocco are crucial to the atmosphere of the books, but this is the first time they’ve been featured on the covers. Both images seem to invite you to enter, don’t they? Come, stroll across the Charles Bridge, or pass through this doorway into the golden light within.
If you do, you will discover monsters and armies, marionettes and artists, antelope horns and forbidden love and jars and jars of teeth. A blue-haired girl and her best friend sip tea from an antique silver service resting on a coffin lid. Both of them are going to fall in love soon, but they don’t know it yet. There will be angels, and kissing, and murder.
And journeys.
Books and travel are two of my prime passions in life—along with family, friends, and nesting—and they’re so connected, emotionally. They feed the same hunger: for the exotic, for new experience, the unknown. While walking in a new city, seeking out somewhere to stop for dinner, it’s always my impulse to keep looking, keep going, because of the tantalizing sense that there will be something magical and unguessable around the next corner.
The next corner.
The next.
It’s like turning pages. What happens next?
As a reader, I’m drawn to books with foreign locales. When I’m reading flap copy, browsing, city names leap out and grab me—Budapest, Macao, Edinburgh, Paris, yes please—and pretty much anything set in India is a sure bet. In my life, I don’t get to travel nearly as much as I’d like to (it seems to me that one generally either has the time but not the money, or the money but not the time), and my book consumption responds to that ache of longing.
And so does my writing—and nowhere more than in these books. Karou, the main character, has access to a portal that can take her to dozens of cities around the world, as easily as stepping across a threshold. Ah, fantasy!
In previous books, I’ve written foreign locales without actually traveling to them, but in this case, these books were solidly inspired by trips to Prague and Morocco, and would not have evolved as they did without them.
I hope that Tesco readers will find these covers as alluring as I do, and be inspired to take these journeys with me.
Thank you so much!
Laini x
