In her debut novel, Inheritance, debut novelist Jane Park follows a successful lawyer thriving in New York City who returns home to the prairies of Alberta after her father passes away. What follows is a meditation on family secrets, as the lawyer discovers her father was originally from South Korea, where he left a brother behind.
Park, who is a MacDowell Fellow and was a participant in the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio and Diaspora Dialogues, spent over a decade in New York before returning to her home province of Alberta, where she currently lives. Her debut novel, which will be published on April 7, 2026, by House of Anansi Press in Canada and Pegasus Books in the U.S., is now available for pre-order.
Debutiful is honored to reveal Inheritance‘s cover, which was designed by Elisha Zapeda, along with a Q&A with Park about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I used to work in midtown Manhattan near the MoMa, and when work was slow, sometimes I’d treat myself to a visit there. A favourite painting was Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World because this painting captures so well the isolation and hardship of living in the prairies. When asked to share images that inspired me, this painting immediately came to mind, and that mood was used for the cover’s background.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
After I sent some inspirational images, things went quiet until I received an email with the book cover.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I loved this exotic looking knife set against the prairies. My novel deals with an immigrant Korean family running a grocery store in a small, rural town, and the cover’s two images—knife and prairie—create a haunting feeling: why are they juxtaposed together? What is their relationship? I hope this mystery is enough to pull in my readers.
My novel took twenty years to write (with a lot of multi-year stalls). I used to joke (darkly) that if someone put a gun to my head, my first thought would be, “Oh no, I didn’t finish my novel!” before worrying about how my children would survive. Seeing my name on a book has been a lifelong dream, and I was gobsmacked. Finally.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
For me, writing is about following obsessions, and I have been obsessed with this knife, an eunjangdo—I actually don’t think I’m done with it yet. Historically, Korean noble women wore this to accessorize with their hanboks. But it also served a purpose: if a man raped a woman, in order to maintain her honour, the woman was expected to take the knife and kill herself. However, when I look at today’s English websites, it says the eunjangdo was also used for self-defence, but every Korean woman I speak with understands this knife to be a suicide knife. In the 1980s, they made plastic versions of these to give to girls as gifts. I received one when I visited Korea. In hindsight, what a horrific item to bestow on a girl.
The knife makes appearances throughout the book. And although the book doesn’t deal with suicide, it deals with the concept of dying to self for the sake of honouring your family, something I saw in a lot of Korean immigrant families growing up and likely why a lot of these kids became high-achievers—my novel explores this burden.