Mistranslation, the debut novel by Madeleine Moss, follows twin sisters in upstate New York as childhood fractures into diverging identities shaped by family absence, cultural inheritance, and the arrival of a boy who unsettles both. Spanning years and continents, it traces how early misunderstandings calcify into lifelong tensions, asking what we inherit, what we misread, and what it costs to finally understand.
Mistranslation will be published on September 22, 2026, by University of Iowa Press and is available for preorder now.
Moss grew up in Ithaca, New York, and received a degree in French literature from Cornell University before obtaining her MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Mistranslation, designed by Kimberly Glyder, along with a Q&A with Moss about its creation.
Plus, see the covers that almost made the final cut.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
No. I’ve had two different novels “die” on submission and I long ago decided that imagining the cover, like imagining who would star in the movie adaptation—as I did when I was fourteen and my first novel went on submission!—is tempting fate. More seriously, I think writing is the only thing writers have control over and that’s what we should focus on; the text of the novel is the novel. With that being said, I had opinions on covers once I was asked to think about them.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Shortly after I signed my contract, Iowa sent over an author questionnaire that had a variety of questions on it, including one about cover ideas: were there any images or motifs I had in mind, any colors I liked or wanted to avoid, that sort of thing. I started looking at the covers on my shelves and in bookstores and assessing what made me like some and dislike others. And there are some covers that I hate: the pastel, sand-strewn covers of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet come to mind. They’re positively offensive; she’s a serious writer!
In any case, I tried to take a practical approach and asked for a specific designer—Kimberly Glyder—who had done some of Iowa’s covers that I particularly liked. She has a vivid, graphic style and I knew she would come up with something good. In addition, I asked for: no photographs, maximalism over minimalism, and graphic or abstract images over ones that picture something clear. And I mentioned several themes of the novel that could possibly offer cover inspiration, such as twins, language and translation, immigration and identity, Upstate NY and France, and Lyon’s traboules, which are secret pathways and staircases that connect seemingly unconnected parts of the city. This latter idea ended up being the one that Kimberly pursued in most of her designs.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I’m quite an ambivalent person, by which I mean that I tend to overthink things, especially emotions. I don’t believe in love at first sight, for example. This has applied to every step of the publishing process for me so far, including the cover. I saw the mockups and liked them—actually, I woke up in the middle of the night, which rarely happens, and saw them on my phone at 2am, which was quite surreal—but I didn’t know which one to pick. I asked a few people who’d read the book and almost everyone liked the orange-and-pink mockup the best, saying it was the most eye-catching; however, when I spoke to my agent about it, she thought it seemed too commercial for the novel. We similarly rejected the mockup with the collaged flower on it because even though I loved the element of collage, we thought it was harder to read: the staircase in the background looks more like a street map, which is interesting but less relevant to the book.
In the end, I asked for the cream color on the teal-and-sky staircase design to be carried through the border, as well as a few other tweaks. Kimberly executed everything exactly as I’d requested and sent it back. When I received the final cover, I knew it was good and that it represented the book in an engaging way, but I had to sit with it for a few days—I even printed it out and hung it on my wall!—before deciding that, yes, I love it.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Mistranslation is about twin sisters growing up in upstate New York, the Arab French boy they both become obsessed with, and their changing relationships over many years, in both the U.S. and France. The characters often misunderstand each other in both literal and more metaphorical ways. Anyway, a key conversation in my novel takes place in the Cour des Voraces traboule in Lyon, France, where I was living when I wrote much of this novel. As I mentioned above, Lyon’s traboules are these cool passageways—alleys and staircases—that connect different streets of the city through interior courtyards.
Kimberly’s abstract and somewhat Escher-like depiction of the Cour des Voraces staircase conveys both an element of place (anyone from Lyon will recognize it) and the sense that the characters are often attempting to move toward one another in understanding and empathy, much like the two silhouettes embarking toward each other on opposite ends of the staircase. If you compare the mockups to the final cover, however, you can see that Kimberly heightened the asymmetry of the staircase in the final version, which emphasizes the sense that maybe these characters—despite their best intentions—will not be able to meet on the same plane. It’s rather brilliant, I find!
