It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is one of the terrific books we've got up for giveaway until the end of February.
Head to our giveaways page for your chance to win!
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We all know the adage about books and covers: don’t judge in the interior of something by its exterior. Good words to live by. Important words. Sometimes life-saving in a world that’s become increasingly parsed by quick-switch assumptions about marginalized bodies.
With actual books, I have most definitely been seduced by a good cover. I’m a visual person and love bold colours and patterns. My home is what some would refer to as “maximalist dopamine decor”, and what others would call “too much.” In giving my publisher examples of what I wanted my own book cover to look like, I asked for colour, drama, and splendour. And my goodness, did my cover designer, Michel Vrana, deliver!
An eye-catching cover is enough for me to pick up a book, but not enough for me to take it home. As much as I’m a sucker for a beautiful cover, I need to be captured by the writing in order to snuggle up and read. When the stars align, and a beautiful cover holds within it beautiful writing, that is a special thing.
Here are nine books with beautiful covers and equally beautiful writing:
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Why I Was Late, by Charlie Petch
Cover art by Emmie Tsumura, in collaboration with Charlie Petch
Wrestlers, kazoos, bras, and pop tarts! These are just a few of the things that populate this explosion of a cover. Intricately drawn with vibrant colours against a black backdrop, each image tells its own story. What fun it is to flip back and forth between cover and poems to discover their full significance.
With poem titles like "Wookie Love," "Why Did the Trans Kid Cross the Road?" and "Just Some Band Names I Think Are Cool," this book is a wild ride. Fiercely original and deeply affecting. Whimsical, but with a heart-squeezing depth that blew my hair back.
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The Pump, by Sydney Hegele
Cover & Portrait Artwork by Jeremy Bruneel
This is the gothic cottage-core cover of my dreams. Two sweatered beavers in a claw-foot bathtub, surrounded by cattails and other swamp vegetation that mingle in the title letters. But wait! There’s more! A fully illustrated back-cover of swamp and trees, and a car nose-dived into the murky waters. This cover is a whole mood. I want to frame it and hang it in my kitchen.
Inside the cover is a collection of interconnected stories bound together by a place known as The Pump: a small Ontario town in the grips of decay. Talking beavers, cats who spit up baby teeth, words scrawled on peeled-off skin. These stories are strange, visceral, and mesmerizing, with vibrant sentences and voicy characters that will linger with you long past the last page.
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Washes, Prays, by Noor Naga
Cover art and design by Emma Dolan
Hands raised to the sky. The elegance of this simple yet powerful gesture. The juxtaposition of coral against the blue. The clean, square font, white and black. Gorgeous.
And the writing? Breath-taking. Washes, Prays is the story of a young immigrant woman in the throes of obsession and heartache after she meets and falls for a married man. The book plunges into the gut of angst and despair, and I could feel its echoes in my own body as I read. The sentences bend into poetry and the imagery is nothing short of brilliant. This book is stunning from cover to cover.
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In-Between Days: A Memoir About Living with Cancer, by Teva Harrison
Cover Design by Alysia Shewchuk
Cover Illustration by Teva Harrison
A mermaid swimming through a striated sea. Arms reaching forward, blue-green hair swept up in the current, a jewel-scaled torso stretching across the book spine, to a multi-coloured tail on the back cover. Beautiful. There’s something about the loose supple lines of the mermaid against the bold striped background, the soft against the hard, that grabs me, reminds me of both the strength and vulnerability of bodies.
Through poignant prose and illustration, the late artist and writer Teva Harrison brings us into the bones of her experience with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer: her diagnosis, her fears, her loves, her childhood dreams, her body’s many metamorphoses. The writing is unflinching and profoundly human.
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No Credit River, by Zoe Whittall
Type and design by Michel Vrana
Cover Image by Ambivalently Yours
Bright pink on pink. A face, though streaming with tears, resolute in an expression of don’t f*ck with me. The original painting, by Canadian artist Ambivalently Yours, is called "Crying Girl No 1 (with Intentional Bitch Face)." Forget the Mona Lisa, this is a face I could stare at for hours. Cheeky, iconoclastic, and deeply relatable.
This is a lyric memoir told in fragments. A rough break-up, a pregnancy, a miscarriage. Grief amidst a world in the early stages of a pandemic. Drum-tight sentences knitted with wit, wisdom, and authenticity. One of my new favourites from Whittall.
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Chrysalis, by Anuja Varghese
Cover Design by Alysia Shewchuk
This one was a no-brainer for this list. Let’s start with the book shape: not the standard rectangle, but an almost-square. Its silhouette is reminiscent of an art-portfolio. And this book is, indeed, art. The cover image, a leafy botanical peaked with three pinked flowers in different stages of bloom. At its base, a butterfly marked with eyespots. The metaphors abound! Drawn with meticulous detail, this cover beautifully captures the life-force of its subjects and gives off major haunted-midnight-garden vibes. (My favourite vibes.)
The stories in this book are startlingly original and speak through marginalised voices that we don’t get to hear often enough. Lightening-struck gods, haunted motels, burning malls, sex, domestic violence, reclamation, twists and turns that surprise, devastate, and delight. Weaving between the fantastical and the mundane, these stories bleed magic.
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Drolleries, by Cassidy McFadzean
Cover Design by Andrew Roberts
Cover Image from The Picture Art Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
This celestial cover presents a 17th-century illustration by artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart. It depicts the phases of Saturn as seen through an early modern telescope. The images of the yellow planet are both geometrically soothing and startlingly vivid against the dark star-punched sky. There is something almost sacred here, like galactic hieroglyphs from the heavens.
For those of you familiar with McFadzean’s work, you know of her genius in invoking the historical, the mythic, and the surreal, while simultaneously pulling us into the deeply vulnerable humanness of our existence. You know of her command of cadence, line, and form. The poems in Drolleries, like the cover, are otherworldly. Dreamscapes, monsters, romance, heartbreak, witchcraft, and the dark and mystical complexities of having a body in the world.
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Just Pervs, by Jess Taylor
Type and design by Tree Abraham
It was the colour of the cover that first caught my attention: a perfect 1950’s-kitchen-appliance green. Then, of course, the naked woman on the horse. I love the large lettering of the title and how the comparatively small horse charges through its middle. There’s an energy here, a momentum, like the horse is going to leap right off the cover.
The stories are subversive, at times hilarious, but also intimate and affecting. The writing is fresh and electric, and it is near impossible to not fall a little in love with the sometimes endearing, sometimes absurd, but always captivating, cast of characters. A rebellious, charming, and wholly cathartic read.
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The Whole Singing Ocean, by Jessica Moore
Cover design by Angela Yen
Cover image by Jessica Moore
A breaching whale projecting from a tangled line of ocean. A simple, yet evocative outline punched against a night-blue background. What’s more, the author herself created the image through a print-making technique called “linocutting”, which involves carving the design into linoleum. The cover both haunts and dazzles.
And yes, the writing is dazzling too. A lyrical account of the author’s yearning to encounter a whale, a school on a ship helmed by a sexual predator, intergenerational trauma, and an ocean swirling with horror and beauty. Is it a poetry? Yes. Is it memoir? Yes. Is it investigative nonfiction? Yes. All those things and more. Gorgeous, sparse, with lines so sharp and glittering, they’ll parse right through you.
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Learn more about It Must Be Beautiful to be Finished:
A raw, beautiful memoir of a girl born missing an ear, a medical system insistent on saving her from herself, and our culture’s desire to “fix” bodies.
When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her “whole”—could make her “right”—and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear. Many of the surgeries failed, leaving permanent damage to her body.
In short, lyrical vignettes, Kate writes about how her “disfigured” body was scrutinized, pathologized, and even weaponized. She describes the physical and psychic trauma of medical intervention and its effects on her sense of self, first as a child needing to be fixed and, later, as a teenager and adult navigating the complex expectations and dangers of being a woman.
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is the story of a girl desperately trying to have a body that makes her acceptable and of a woman learning to own a body she has never felt was hers to define. In an age of speaking out about the abuse of marginalized bodies, this memoir takes a hard look at the role of the medical system in body oppression and trauma.