Judging a book by its cover: brilliant book jackets from 2024

An evocative apothecary bottle fills the cover of Lizzie Pook's atmospheric Victorian chiller. 

London, 1850. Constance Horton has disappeared. Maude, her older sister, knows only that Constance abandoned the apothecary they call home, and, disguised as a boy, boarded a ship bound for the Arctic. She never returned. When she finds Constance’s journal, it becomes clear that the truth is being buried by sinister forces. To find answers Maude must step into London’s dark underbelly, and into the path of dangerous, powerful men. The kind of men who seek their fortune in the city’s horrors, from the hangings at Newgate to the ghoulish waxworks of Madame Tussaud’s. 

This understated jacket manages to capture the essence of the book using very few elements – a sure sign of a great cover.

What actually happened when Eilis returned to New York? Long Island is the long-awaited sequel to Colm Tóibín's prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life; twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. But then a man with an Irish accent knocks on their door, and everything changes. Did Eilis make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path? 

This brilliant, eye-catching piece of design is **chef's kiss.**

How Was It for You? is a candid, often angry and frequently funny memoir which gives a unique insight into the world of sex work. The author has worked in the sex industry for twenty years, in brothels, as an escort and as a dominatrix. We join her in the villas of wealthy clients, in police cells and in the maternity ward as she becomes a mother, as she challenges outsider perceptions of the sex industry and those who work in it. 

A frame-worthy jacket encloses the long-awaited new novel from the three times Booker-nominee.

A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss. And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.

The full-bleed photo of the author as a beautiful yet serious child both plays into and challenges our perceptions of sociopaths, much like her astonishing memoir. 

Come for the jaw-dropping insider view and vicarious thrill of a sociopath recounting their darker impulses, stay for the redemptive love story and fascinating insights you could only get from a sociopath who is also a doctor of psychology. Ever since she was a small child, Patric Gagne knew she was different. Finally diagnosed as an adult, she soon realised that the official descriptions of sociopathy were far from the full story. With help, and a change in perceptions, is there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And can she find it before her own behaviour goes a step too far?

Watch the video below to see how this ingenious jacket lets the reader choose their preferred pronoun and colour.

He, She, They, Us pulls together poems from queer poets both old and new – from Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes to the likes of Jay Hulme, Dean Atta, Harry Josephine Giles, Nikita Gill, Theo Parish and Travis Alabanza: an inclusive array of voices, from modern and contemporary poets to those who came before.

A stunning night sky shimmers across the finale to Lucinda Riley's epic Seven Sisters series, now out in paperback. 

Paris, 1928. A boy is found, moments from death, and taken in by a kindly family who gives him a life he could never have dreamed of, but he refuses to tell anyone who he truly is. As he grows into a young man, an evil is rising across Europe and he knows he must soon flee again. The final novel in the Seven Sisters series, Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt, reveals how the sisters came to be adopted by their beloved, mysterious father, drawing the epic series to a stunning, unforgettable conclusion. Finally, readers will know the answer to the ultimate question: who is Pa Salt?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold fans will love adding this delightful new pink iteration of the series' stylish, highly covetable covers, to their collection (and look – the cat's moved again).

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. The fourth book in Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling series introduces four new visitors to the cafe: the husband with something important left to say, the woman who couldn’t bid her dog farewell, the woman who couldn’t answer a proposal and the daughter who drove her father away.