Cover Reveal: See the cover for Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel, The Nursery.
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel, The Nursery, forthcoming from Pantheon in March 2023. The novel, a “visceral and revelatory portrait of a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness,” follows a translator at home with her new baby, Button.
Here’s the beautiful, striking cover:
Cover designer Linda Huang says, “I was 7 months pregnant when I read The Nursery. As someone who is prone to dark thoughts, I was especially curious to get a glimpse into one mother’s spiral into postpartum disaffection—an often unspoken yet common part of motherhood. Now that I’ve endured those early days myself, I can attest to that painful, relentless, sleep-deprived fog. (During one particularly exhausting week, I remember staring at the wall, hunched over nursing my daughter, thinking I was going to crack.) In one memorable line, Szilvia writes about being a “milk bar” (I can now completely empathize). My first instinct was to depict this gravid image: a single giant breast. The blurriness adds a touch of sophistication and references the bleariness of it all, nights and days blending into one amorphous slog, milk dribbling everywhere.
“To design a cover that’s striking yet subtle, eerie but also funny is incredibly difficult,” said Molnar. “I didn’t know this is what I was hoping for until I saw Linda Huang’s design. Huang is an amazing artist and she captured the essence of this novel perfectly.”
And book’s editor, Lisa Lucas, tells us: “It’s a rare day that you love the cover of a novel as much as you love the pages in between, but Linda Huang’s raw-but-beautiful design is the perfect complement to Szilvia’s extraordinary portrait of a woman who is feeling the walls close in around her—provocative, defiant, unsettling, and slyly funny.”
The Nursery is out in March and can be preordered here.
