In her debut novel, The Light in Other Houses, Anna Marschalk-Burns explores motherhood, infertility, desire, and found family. The novel follows Zoe, who returns to her hometown of Minneapolis after years of failed fertility treatments and finds herself drawn into the lives of her new neighbor Danni and her five-year-old daughter.
Marschalk-Burns is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship and the Himan Brown Award. Her short fiction has appeared in SLICE, Joyland, and Literary Hub. Her debut novel is set to be published by Zando on March 9, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal The Light in Other Houses’s cover, designed by Lucy Kim and featuring a painting by Jeremy Miranda, along with a Q&A with Marschalk-Burns about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I was occupied by trying to see each character, gesture, and place clearly. Those pieces felt like an ever-shifting collage the longer I wrote–I couldn’t have pinned one image down.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
My editor Masie Cochran asked me to share examples of covers I loved, a fun assignment that sent me to my local Minneapolis bookstore Magers & Quinn. I tried to select covers that conveyed what I want from novels as a reader: a sense of intimacy, playfulness, and intensity.
After that, I stayed hands-off. I trusted the designers at Zando to capture the feel of the novel. They brought three options to me, at which point I anxiously consulted friends and family who’d read the book and asked for their rankings. But it was a rigged poll because one of the covers spoke to me immediately. I just needed confirmation that my gut was right.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Thrilling. The painting by Jeremy Miranda and design by Lucy Kim feels like stepping outside at night to wander around and peer into other people’s lives. I love the soft pastels of the font, the orange glow of the open window, the twilight blue leaves.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover captures the sense of being close to something warm and intimate but still circling the periphery. That outside-looking-in view conveys what infertility can feel like, and specifically what it feels like to be the narrator Zoe, who has chosen to live pressed up close against what she wants and can’t seem to access. She watches the fantasies (and illusions) she holds about motherhood play out through a window and across a lawn before allowing herself to step inside.
The cover also mirrors the tone of Zoe’s voice–yearning, moody, revealing. The feeling of trading secrets in a dark bar or standing at the edge of a lake past sunset next to someone you desperately want to touch.