Today sees the publication day of A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell, a novel so stylishly written that Harper’s Bazaar professed ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are slugging it out for the film rights already.’ We took the chance to sit down with the cover designer Jo Walker and ask her exactly what in the novel inspired her to create a cover that somehow encompasses the themes and the style of the book so perfectly.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Tom Killingbeck explains why he is still haunted by’ The Virgin Suicides’ Cecilia Lisbon…
On the first page of Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon tries to kill herself in the bath, ‘slitting her wrists like a Stoic’. In one short, shocking paragraph, Eugenides introduces a character who has remained indelibly etched on my mind ever since I read the novel as a teenager, like initials on the bark of a tree. Read more…
