I’m thrilled to share the cover for Children of the Salt Road, whose official publication date is September 26, 2017.
This beautiful cover will exist in two forms—as you see it here for the print and audio versions, and in a subtly animated form for the Kindle edition. The water will sparkle, the clouds will drift by in the breeze—it’s one of the Kindle in Motion features you’ll see in Children of the Salt Road.
I hope you’ll find the cover so intriguing, you’ll want to head on over to pre-order your copy today. Just click here!
I do want to talk a little bit about the very special place the cover depicts. Children of the Salt Road is set in a fictional town in western Sicily. I hatched the plan for the book while on vacation there—in a real town!–and set it 25 years in the past. I had fallen in love with Lo Stagnone, the magical lagoon of the cover. Within the lagoon, the water is very shallow, and at times looks like a sheet of glass, a very large sheet of glass. The water level in the area has changed dramatically over the years. And when you speak of over the years here, you go right back to the Punic Wars (around 200BC), when the lagoon was dry land. Until recently, it was possible to walk through the waters of the lagoon from the coast of Sicily to an offshore island, a distance of just under a mile. Some local people say it is still possible. My family—
not me, I form the sedentary control group in our little clan—kayaked it several times and confirmed that it never got very deep, under a foot in some places and several feet in others, and looked as if you might well be able to walk it.
That’s what we see Catherine, the main character in Children of the Salt Road, doing on the cover. As it turns out for poor Catherine, when the winds kick up–which is most of the time–it is steady and strong, transforming the sparkling, mirror-like surface of the water into a uniform set of small waves all moving in the same direction. The experience is about to prove a little disorienting for her, out there in the water all alone, shortly after the moment of calm the cover shows us.
If you’d like to see some photos of the lagoon, click here. That’s the website for the wonderful little B&B we stayed in and I can assure you, the area is every bit as enchanting as it appears in the pictures.
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