Not waving but Drowning

What an exciting moment! At lunchtime my publisher sent me the cover of my first novel, The Gift of Honey, which is due out in July.

It wasn't at all what I imagined. However, after living with it for an afternoon, it is beginning to grow on me.

The novel is a tale of Cornish saints and Victorian parsons, smuggling and cholera epidemics. So in my mind's eye (which, admittedly, isn't a very good eye - I have a somewhat underdeveloped visual sense) I imagined the cover would be a lurid drawing, figuring - at the very least - a Celtic cross, a Cornish cove, a slate-roofed church and a lugger fluttering St Piran's flag.

But the publisher's cover is much more subtle than any of that. The sepia photograph conjures up the period in which The Gift of Honey is set (well, nearly: is that a dress really from c.1840?). More than that it hints at the central relationship in the novel: that between the protagonist, Parson Mudge, and his niece Isobel.

But better still, and far cleverer, is that this photograph made me think of the Stevie Smith poem, Not Waving but Drowning. And that's a poem that conjures up Mudge's predicament to a tee.

Clever people, over at bluechrome!

Oh, and one last thing: the bluechrome logo, those two little squiggles down in the bottom right-hand corner, which are supposed to look like sails (I think) - don't they look like a shark's fin poking out of the turbid Cornish waters? They do to me.