Jennifer Acker‘s debut book, The Limits of the World, was a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, and The Yale Review, among other places. Now she’s back with another novel, publishing on April 14, 2026. Surrender follows a seasoned New York PR executive who returns to her family’s struggling Massachusetts farm, where she faces the collapse of her marriage, her husband’s failing health, and her own inexperience as a farmer. As she rediscovers love with a childhood friend, Lucy must navigate the tangled pressures of loyalty, loss, and the uncertain promise of starting over.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover designed by Abby Weintraub, along with a Q&A with Jennifer Acker about how the cover for Surrender was created.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
My protagonist, Lucy, returns to rural Massachusetts after a career in New York City to save the family farm. After her much-older husband makes a disastrous financial decision, Lucy needs to ramp up her retail efforts, and she spends some time brainstorming how to market her farm. The fictional logo she comes up with—hot pink goats on a pale pink background with black lettering (like the jacket!)—is based in part on the brand identity of a real-life dairy farm, Fuzzy Udder Creamery, which was one of my sources of research and inspiration for this novel.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The jacket design process is perhaps my favorite part of publishing a book. It’s pure joy, compared with the blood, sweat, and tears that go into writing and selling. I had the good fortune to work with an old friend, Abby Weintraub; we were colleagues at Knopf some years ago and I always admired her designs. It was a delight to share my novel with her and see her ideas. She submitted five or six different directions, and it was so hard to choose. I did some crowdsourcing, showing the options to friends and family, and I sat with them a while. I kept being tugged back to this design, the hot pink goats, it just felt so fun and fresh, and I loved the feeling of goats running amok.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Amazing! When you have a cover, that’s when the book feels real, when you realize others are going to see it in stores—and hopefully buy it!
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
Not to stereotype too much, but the colors showcase that this is a book about women following their passions, and how they gather the support and love of other women along the way. Lucy falls in love with a woman she knows from high school, which creates a kind of beauty in her life that she was missing, but is also a source of enormous conflict.
Plus, there are lots of adorable goats in this book! Their rambunctious activity—stepping on the title, on my name—also conveys how active and often overwhelming a farmer’s life can be.