A century ago people hiking through what is now Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, in the U.S. state Nebraska, reported finding animal bone fragments. In 1953 Donald Peterson, a teenage farm worker, found part of rhinoceros skill in the area. Though he didn’t know it then, Peterson had stumbled upon a paleontological treasure trove. …
It was the plot of Love, Rosie (published by Hachette Books, 2004) by prolific Irish author Cecelia Ahern, that made me blink. Star-crossed lovers deemed (by fate?) to be an item, who find themselves struggling to connect on account of myriad forces apparently working against them (by fate?), in a story spanning decades. Not that …
One should never judge a book by its cover, that’s an axiom, but here at Short List Books, I can’t help but judge, or would that be admire book covers. And what a feast for the eyes is the cover of Lucky’s (published by Picador/Pan Macmillan Australia, 2020), the debut novel of Sydney based Australian …
It may be non-fiction and therefore a little outside our usual remit, but the cover of The Uninhabitable Earth (published by Penguin Random House, in 2020) by David Wallace-Wells, a writer for New York Magazine, is another fine example of cover design, while the subject matter is too important to shy away from. Farhad Manjoo, …
The challenges facing book cover designers are many. In one frame, if you like, on a single canvas, they must endeavour to encapsulate the central theme of the book, be original, and produce a work that is also eye-catching. It’s a big ask, and I can’t say I envy the work of book cover designers. …
