Yasmin Adele Majeed’s debut novel, Side Streams, is a polyphonic story about family secrets, queer identity, art, and the silences passed between generations. Growing up between her mother’s Filipino American roots and her father’s tight-knit Pakistani American community in the Bay Area, Aliya Amjad becomes fascinated by the mysteries her mother refuses to explain, including an art installation dedicated to an unknown woman. Decades later, Aliya reconnects with her childhood friend Samir, and together they begin untangling the secrets their parents kept and questioning whether silence protected their families or simply kept them apart.
Majeed is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2025, Narrative, Guernica, and Joyland, among others.
Side Streams will be published by Little, Brown on March 30, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Side Streams, designed by Grace Han with art direction by Keith Hayes. Below, Majeed discusses wanting a cover grounded in the California Bay Area, the Diego Rivera mural that helped inspire the novel, and how the final design captures the beauty, friction, and wonder of trying to turn an artistic vision into something tangible.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Absolutely not! I could barely conceive of my messy drafts as a novel, let alone as a physical book out in the world.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I sent over a document containing covers I loved, as well as covers I wasn’t a fan of. I was particularly drawn to covers that were grounded in a sense of place, as in many ways, Side Streams is a love letter to the California Bay Area. I envisioned a cover that had evoked the setting of the novel–either through color or motif.
One of the central threads of Side Streams is the search for a missing artist, and the immense mural she made with her lover. There is a character involved in the transportation of the mural across San Francisco, and while writing I was inspired in part by Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity, a multi-paneled mural which depicts the Bay Area and its bridges. I also included Rivera’s work in my document, and I was thrilled to see that Grace Han’s gorgeous, brilliant cover for Side Streams captures the panels of the mural, down to those small brassy dots that indicate its rivets.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I didn’t expect to be so surprised by the cover, but it was jarring to see my novel–which had only previously existed as a sprawl of Microsoft Word documents–encapsulated in a single image. I had to sit with the image, and the more I did, the more I fell in love with its small details and touches: the vibrant colors that capture a sense of the sky and sea, the tactile quality of the painted panels, the disjuncture and friction created between them when they don’t line up perfectly, and of course, the immediate majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. I feel a little burst of joy every time I look at it now, and I’m so grateful to Grace and to Keith Hayes for the work they put into making it.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Side Streams is a story about so many things: family secrets, queer childhood, growing up in the immigrant suburbs of the Bay Area. It’s also, importantly, about the trials and wonders of being an artist–of seeing the world in a particular way, striving to capture that vision, and the difficulty of pinning it down. The cover gets at that process so beautifully, with a sense of play and wonder.