We’re always being told that you can’t—or shouldn’t—judge a book by its cover, but in fact we all do exactly that. Often the single motivating factor in deciding whether to pick up a particular book is how we respond to the cover. But there are some books—perhaps especially novels—that are so complex and challenging to describe that it’s difficult to imagine the right cover for them, one that draws the reader in, hinting at the particular gifts that the book offers. Here are some of my very favorite novels that I’m glad I didn’t judge by their covers.


For me, the wickedly leering doll on the cover of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend didn’t convey the strengths of this coming-of-age novel, which features Harriet Dufresnes, a gutsy twelve-year-old kid on the cusp of adolescence—think Scout Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Frankie, the heroine of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding—who decides she is going to track down the person who murdered her older brother, Robin, twelve years before.

• Comment on other books often judged (rightly or wrongly) by their covers.

The cover of Fool by Frederick G. Dillen doesn’t give much sense of the unexpected treat awaiting readers of this quirky novel about Barnaby Griswold, a middle-aged man who has consistently made all the wrong decisions—in both his public and private lives—and who at last realizes that it’s finally time to grow up.


The cover gives little hint of the charms of John Griesemer’s No One Thinks of Greenland, but this novel about Rudy Spruance, a young army corporal who is sent as punishment to an army base in Greenland (where the six months of winter are known as the “stark, raving dark”), and who finds his loyalties tested when he starts uncovering secrets that his superior officers would rather keep hidden, is a treasure.



In Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design, Alan Powers reminds us of the power of book jackets to sell books (or, conversely, to influence us not to buy or even borrow and read a book). Although it’s decidedly Britishcentric, most of the books whose covers are shown will be recognizable to American readers—William Faulkner’s Light in August, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, and novels by P. D. James, Agatha Christie, James Baldwin, and Dick Francis, among many others. There’s also a picture of the wonderful cover done in England for one of my favorite novels, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.