Black Gate

Andrew Michael Hurley self-published his first collection Cages and Other Stories (2006), and released his second, The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and Other Stories (2008) through tiny Lime Tree Press. However, those days are over. His debut novel Loney, released in the UK in trade paperback by John Murray last year (cover above left) won the Costa First Novel Award, was listed as a Best Book of the Year by the London Times and Daily Mail, ranked a Best Summer Book by Publishers Weekly, won Best Book of the Year in the British Book Industry Awards, and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

It was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last May with a new cover (above right), and the buzz on this side of the pond was just as stellar. The New York Times Book Review said “The terrors of this novel feel timeless… There are abominations here, and miracles.” Jeff VanderMeer called it “Stunning,” and Stephen King said, “It’s not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction.”

Here’s the description.

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We covered the first three novels in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne right here last year. Skullsworn, the new standalone novel in the same world, features the adventures of a priestess-assassin for the God of Death. It will be published by Tor Books this week in both the US and the UK.

Although the US and UK editions have similar publishing dates, that’s pretty much all they have in common. The descriptions for each book are markedly different — and the covers are dramatically different. The US version by Richard Anderson (above left) has lush colors and and action scene, while the UK cover (above right), designed by Matthew Garrett, is heavily design-focused. In a guest post at Tor.com, Brian Staveley talks about the US cover.

This one hits all the right notes… it gives a feel for the city, but here Pyrre is in the shadows, close to the quotidian world of human affairs, but separate, unnoticed. She’s also motionless. Her knife is drawn, but the drama doesn’t come from the knife itself, or the imminent violence, but from what’s in her mind, from her struggle to understand her own motives and emotions, then to translate them into the life she wants to live. It’s not easy to fall in love, especially when you’re staying up late every night giving women and men to the god of death. That’s the book I’m trying to write… The final version of the cover is just perfect. The color, the claustrophobia of Dombang’s hot, narrow alleys, the fish-scale lanterns, Pyrre’s crouch, ready, predatory, but not yet committed — this cover captures everything I’d hoped about the book.

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