Unwrapping a copy of Abi Daré’s The Girl With The Louding Voice April last year, I felt a palpable sense of déjà vu. There was something about the rainbow hues, abstract shapes and vaguely identifiable silhouette of a woman that felt all too familiar. Hadn’t I seen this cover before?

By mid-2021, the bulk of my recently purchased books fitted neatly into this category: hardback copies of Meng Jin’s Little Gods and The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste sat beneath well-thumbed paperbacks of Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death Of Vivek Oji. Clearly, colourful daubs had become shorthand for literary fiction by authors of colour.

Many trace this aesthetic back to Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, released in the summer of 2020. As more and more vibrant covers emerged in the windows of bookshops around the world, design publications and news sites began to pick up on the style. A catalogue of monikers were born, from the ‘book blob’ to the ’unicorn frappe cover’, after the psychedelic Starbucks drink that went viral in 2017. Others referred to the trend as “amorphous blobs of suggestive colour” in an attempt to describe these alluring yet ultimately enigmatic jackets.  

It was these designs that first got me thinking about other similar book jackets: covers with ripe and rotting fruit – just place Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women next to Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground to see what I mean. Or, more recently, women slumped unhappily against walls, desks, couches, you name it – the approach has been termed ‘women on the edge’.