Which cover would you go for? 'Some Kind of Fairy Tale' (Graham Joyce)

You know how it goes... A UK publisher will send me a book and then a US publisher will send their edition of the same book. Sometimes it goes the other way round :o) I'm not going to read both of them but always end up wanting to give the 'other book' a chance at some blog time, so... The 'Which cover would you go for?' posts were born.

This time round, the UK and US editions of Graham Joyce's 'Some Kind of Fairy Tale' face off in a battle that will only be decided by your votes (which go in the comments section). First up though, some blurb...

It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery.


He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.


But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

My copy has been waiting, on the pile, for me to be in the mood to pick it up, mood is so important to my reading choices these days... It will be read though.
But what about those covers? Check em' out,

The US Cover.

The UK Cover.

My money is on the UK cover, purely because it doesn't look like a badly staged photograph with a smoke machine just out of sight... I've never been a fan of 'photo covers' actually; if they're not done right then they look awful and I'm yet to come across one that looks 'right' to me.

That's what I think anyway, how about you? Go on, leave a comment :o)