I had not expected choosing a cover for Why the Curlew Cries to be so difficult.
By the time a manuscript reaches this stage, you know the story intimately. You know its silences, its hidden wounds and the places where darkness gathers. Then you are asked to reduce all of that to a single image.
The cover needed to capture the isolation of the Ox Mountains, the beauty of rural Ireland and the uneasy feeling that something terrible may be happening just beyond sight. It had to feel literary without appearing gentle, and threatening without becoming a conventional crime cover.

Several designs came close. Some captured the landscape. Others captured the curlew or the sense of loneliness at the heart of the story. But each seemed to emphasise a slightly different version of the novel.
Eventually, I stopped asking which cover was the most striking and began asking which one felt most truthful.
The one I chose felt less like an illustration and more like a doorway into the world I had written: the empty road, the threatening sky, the distant house and the suggestion of someone alone in a landscape too large to notice what might happen to them.
A book cover cannot tell the whole story.
It only has to make the reader wonder what lies beyond the next bend.