book cover design & illustration
genre: Upmarket Fiction / Women's Fiction with Magical Realism (Book Club Fiction)
book synopsis:
There is a hidden path between the river and the woods that only appears to women on the verge of disappearing from their own lives. When an unnamed young woman awakens at the edge of that path carrying nothing but a backpack filled with torn photographs, she cannot remember who she is or why she chose to leave.
As she follows the course of a river that changes direction without warning, she passes through villages marked by an old flood that washed away not only homes and roads, but fragments of the community's collective memory. At each stop, she encounters people who insist they recognize her by different names and tell stories about who she might have been: a sister who left without saying goodbye, a missing friend, a first love who never returned.
Guided by voices that seem to rise from the water and landscapes assembled from fragments of memory, she begins to suspect that her journey is not about discovering who she once was: it is about deciding who she wants to be when she finally finds her way home. Because some losses happen all at once, and others happen so slowly that we only notice them when we no longer recognize ourselves.
Adaptation of my previous artwork "Blinded By Nostalgia" into a fictional book cover and synopsis project.
This is a personal/speculative project. I used an existing piece from my collage portfolio as a starting point and explored how it might work as a book cover for this specific genre, creating a fictional editorial concept around it