To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, the debut novel by Devon Halliday, is set over the course of a single humid week and traces seven interconnected lives of an ensemble cast in a small Appalachian college town as private crises surface and begin to collide. As secrets spread and choices sharpen, it becomes a study of staying versus leaving, and how even our most certain decisions can feel provisional under pressure.
To Stay, To Stay, To Stay will be published on October 27, 2026, by McSweeney’s and is available for preorder now.
Halliday is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer with fiction published in Ploughshares, One Story, and West Branch, among other journals. Her essays and criticism appear in Liberties, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and CRAFT.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, designed by Justin Carder, along with a Q&A with Halliday about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
My novel has an ensemble cast, so I knew the cover would need to convey that somehow. I was picturing dollhouses, silhouettes in the windows, those Tomi Um illustrations of a bustling cityscape. I also imagined that the repetition of the title would factor in somehow—the words stacking on top of each other, or echoing down the page, or facing each other like reflections.
I didn’t have a clear sense of the color scheme or mood of the cover, because throughout the writing process, the mood of the book changed drastically. Sometimes I was writing a tragic story, sometimes a redemptive story, sometimes a comforting story. Even in its final form, I think the novel maintains an ambiguous tone—it’s a wistful book, and that can come across either sad or hopeful.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
McSweeney’s brought me in at the very beginning of the design process. We held an early meeting to brainstorm, and to talk through the questionnaire I had filled out. I realized quickly that my vision was pretty vague (font preferences? illustration style? no idea!), so I spoke more about the themes of the novel than the imagery. I talked about the decisions that the characters face—to stay or to go? to double down or to walk away?—and how daunting these decisions feel in the moment, even if, in retrospect, they’ll seem obvious or preordained.
As it turned out, focusing on the themes was key. Justin came up with a vision for a cover with a rotating wheel. You can turn the wheel and see the characters move through their different stages: staying, going, staying, going, staying, going. My reaction to the wheel proposal was something like this: “I love it! Wait, maybe it’s too insane. No, I don’t care, I love it!”
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I was thrilled—and relieved. Writing a novel is hard, and coming up with a great cover for that novel is also hard. The moment I saw the cover, I knew that we had gotten the two hardest steps out of the way. With a cover this good, everything from here on out will be easy! (Right?)
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
On a literal level, the cover tells you what you’re in for: this is a small, quiet town, beautiful and quaint, but also starting to wear down—you can see the pothole in the road. As you turn the wheel in the center, you see the characters cycle through, in all their indecision. The wheel can rest on any of the characters—there’s no single version of how this cover should look—which confers equal importance on all the characters. That’s fitting for the book, as the omniscient narrator roves between the different perspectives, never settling in one mind for long.
I love how the warm colors of the trees—green leaves, golden sunlight—contrast with the blue shadows across the road. That perfectly captures the tone of the novel for me: there’s a sweetness to it, but also some of that wistfulness, maybe a hint of regret.
And then there are the illustrations of the characters themselves: specific enough that you can recognize them, but general enough that they don’t override imagination. I had sent Justin quick physical descriptions of each of the characters, along with ideas of how they might be shown staying vs. going. I’m so fond of how they came out—and I like that there’s no obvious moral judgment on the different options. It’s hard to tell, looking at the illustrations, whether staying or going is the right move. It’s hard to tell in life too!