What I love about the cover art is that it’s not retro, not modern, not set in any decade at all, which accomplishes the feat of capturing a novel that ricochets back and forth in time. Also–and how did the designer know this?–it captures the very moment that propelled me to write this novel, and my own deep-seated fear of losing my kids. That happened, or so I feared, one day at a family gathering at my parents’  house in Ohio when my three year old suddenly wasn’t anywhere. The last place she was seen was on a swingset at a neighbor’s house and I’ll never forget running across the yard, around the fence, and coming upon a swing creaking back and forth, empty.

Happily, she was found. She’d wandered a bit and knocked on someone’s door who called 911. A policewoman picked her up in a car and toured the neighborhood, hoping she’d recognize the house she had come from. There was a big orange Irish flag flapping on my parents’ stoop that day, and my daughter recognized it. When she got out of the car, she was clutching a homemade teddy bear sewn by volunteers for abused and abandoned children, to comfort them in the police car and seeing her holding that was a blow almost as powerful as her being lost in the first place.

The cover image embodies every swell of emotion in which this novel was born.