Countdown to June

 

A heavy box arrives...this is always a lovely moment, one of the iconic moments, I suppose, of an author's life. This one is from HarperCollins in New York, and it contains early copies of the paperback edition of The Sea Garden, due out in the US on June 16th. 

 

It's a beautiful book, both to look at and touch. The wisteria cover by Amanda Kain is unchanged from the hardback - so many people loved its enticing sense of mystery, that it would have made no sense to change. The back cover is slightly pearlized, which is why it has flared in the photo. Thanks again, to my editor Jennifer Barth and text designer Leah Carlson-Stanisic for all the care they put into this book. Thanks too, to Sarah Blake and Sarah Jio for their generosity in providing such alluring blurbs. 

 

 

I feel I ought to explain my absence from the blog, far longer than I intended back in March, when I wanted to devote my time to writing the next novel and coming to terms with my mother's death. But sadly my father passed away, last month, only four months after her. To say I have found a normal routine hard to maintain is an understatement. I have been quietly getting on with editing what I wrote during the winter, but social media has been beyond me.

 

However, over the next few weeks, I shall endeavour to put up some posts relevant to The Sea Garden to send it on its way. 

The Sea Garden: UK cover

 

Here it is...the Orion cover for The Sea Garden, to be published in a few months' time. I think it's beautiful, and that old house is almost exactly what was in my head as I invented a villa on the southern French island of Porquerolles, with its garden on the cusp of running to wilderness above the sea. 

 

There are some very clever detailed touches, and I particularly like the painterly effect in the sky and the bay behind with background hills. It seems to me to have just the right atmosphere of slight foreboding despite the sun and bright blue, with that dense bank of trees and bushes casting shadows all the way up the path. The grey band around it seems to give the impression of looking into an old bevelled-edged mirror.

 

But over to you...what do you think? Are you interested, as I am, in how it reflects the differences between the US and UK markets? (The US cover is in the blog's column to the right.) Will you be intrigued and want to pick it up in a bookshop, even if you knew nothing about it? Perhaps this blurb from Sarah Blake, who wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, The Postmistress, might clinch it: 

 

"THE SEA GARDEN weaves a double spell, and honestly, it got me right from the start. Lawrenson steeps her story of the invisible heroes of the French Resistance crossing borders - and here, crossing time - deep in the eerie beauty of the South of France. The result is a marvellous strange fruit: think Graham Greene served up with a dash of Poe."