Thursday 19 July 2012

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)

8 comments:

shaneo52 said...

I'd have to say about a tie for me, nothing real cool either way.

RedEyedGhost said...

I prefer the US cover, because the UK cover is in the same style as The Silent Land's cover and that book was a massive disappointment.

Elfy said...

I'm going to go for the UK cover. It just seems to convey more about the feel of the story than the US one.

Carmen said...

I'm not blown away by either covers but would err on the UK. Neither would really tempt me to pick the book up which is a shame as going by the blurb it's right up my street and sounds really good! Will look out for it now.

Heloise said...

UK cover here too, and by a wide margin - the US cover looks like a still from a cheap 70s horror movie. I also rather like how the design resembles that of Silent Land - but then, I have not read that one yet. Nor anything else by Graham Joyce, now that I think about it - I suppose I should remedy that soon...

Unknown said...

I prefer the simplicity of the UK cover, as well as the border. Photo covers do nothing for me at all.

Unknown said...

The UK cover is pretty cool.

Ken E Baker said...

I think the UK cover is the nicer of the two. The US cover appears to be more for a movie - more commercial (and maybe suited to a more commercial US audience). I would definitely pick up the UK version of the book if I was at a bookstore.