See the cover for Nini Berndt’s debut novel There Are Reasons For This

Nini Berndt’s debut novel There Are Reasons For This follows Lucy as she arrives in Denver, searching for Helen, the woman her brother Mikey loved before his death. Moving in across from Helen, Lucy uncovers a city in decay, disturbing truths, and an unexpected obsession with Helen, who remains unaware of Lucy’s true identity. As their lives become entangled, Lucy realizes her reasons for coming to Denver run deeper than simply uncovering what happened to her brother. The novel explores love, desire, family, and the mysterious forces that bind them.

Berndt, who received her MFA from the University of Florida and now lives in Denver with her wife and son, is publishing her debut from Tin House on June 3, 2025. It is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is ecstatic to give a first look at the striking cover of There Are Reasons For This, designed by Beth Steidle, Tin House’s Director of Design and Production. See the cover below and get a behind-the-scenes look at how it came to be.

While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?

In grad school I had a friend who saw this singular color in everything she read. This book was always yellow to me. Yellow is such an interesting color, it’s this warning and also life-giving, generating. Yellow has a pulse. So I knew yellow needed to appear somewhere in the cover. Tin House makes undeniably beautiful books, every single one of them, so from there, I really wanted the designer to have free reign. My editor had this idea of some convergence of a nipple, the sun, and a peephole, which are the unifying images of the book (which never would have occurred to me without Masie). I loved that idea, but it ended up not being the right fit. 

Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?

I never thought about how many people influence the cover until I started working on mine! You really need to get everyone on board. I feel really lucky that I was able to see a lot of different covers and be as involved in the process as I was. The first covers I saw didn’t feel right for my book. So my agent and editor and I sat down and looked at some other options. There was an image of a statuesque woman’s body that we all liked as an image, but that seemed to sway the book too speculative. This is silly, but I thought about my dad in a book store. I asked myself, “Would my dad pick up this book?” I didn’t want the cover to immediately turn anyone away. Ultimately we picked specific elements we loved—the sky, the colors, a bolder font—and asked the designer to highlight those. She sent a few more options, and this was the clear winner. It felt like my book. 

What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?

Wild. There’s something about seeing your name on a book. Especially when you fantasize about it for so long, knowing that someday in the near future you’ll see this in a book store, your book, your title, your name, this gorgeous punch of color, something both intimately yours and now completely separate from you, living a whole life of its own. It makes my heart race every time I look at it. In a good way. 

How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the book are?

The subtle tilt of the world is so central to the book, like everything is slowly slipping over into something else. This slightly ominous sky, the chem trails, these rich, bold, arresting colors, felt like they captured the tone of the book, the building strangeness and unease of the world but something still familiar. There are all these amazing little details that really make you look. The tiny bits of blue peeking through, the slight warping of the letters in the bubbles. The book is subtle in many ways, and I love that the cover is able to meld this boldness of color with the subtleness of these details. The cover offers a tone, a mood, an invitation to a storm. That’s what I want readers to feel when they look at it.