Omer Friedlander’s The House in Talbiya is a multigenerational novel following two families, one Israeli and one Palestinian, connected by a house in Jerusalem. Spanning a century, the novel moves from Prague and Jerusalem to Ramallah, Berlin, and New York, exploring diaspora, exile, loss, and the longing for home.
Friedlander is the author of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. He was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Tel Aviv, and now lives in New York City. The House in Talbiya will be published by Random House on March 9, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The House in Talbiya, designed by Rachel Ake. Below, Friedlander discusses the paintings that inspired the cover, the significance of its house and bird imagery, and how the final design captures the novel’s fragmented layers of memory, displacement, and home.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
When I was writing The House in Talbiya, I didn’t think too much about the cover. I was still trying to figure out the story. And it’s a complex one. The novel follows several generations of two families –– one Israeli and one Palestinian –– over a century. The families are connected through a single house, a beautiful stone villa in the elegant neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem. Once I felt the book was close to being done, I started imagining the cover, and I knew I wanted the focus to be on the house that connects the two families.
I started putting together a collection of images for inspiration, mostly paintings I loved. One of them was by one of my favorite artists, an obscure painter named Yehoshua Grossbard. It was a painting of tall yellow houses with shuttered windows. In the distance, we can see a patch of blue, the sea. Grossbard was painting a view of Haifa, the city he made into his home after he immigrated from Poland to Mandatory Palestine in 1939. When he moved there, his art changed completely. He credits the transformation to the intensity of the sunlight. Settling in Haifa, he left behind the dreary, dark, grey paintings of shtetls in Eastern Europe, and his new paintings became lighter, using shades of yellows and pastels. It was a kind of investigation into this new, blinding, brilliant sunlight, that was completely new to him. I was very interested in a house that absorbs the qualities of sunlight. Grossbard’s paintings are cityscapes, they’re architectural. They look like elongated yellow and ochre flat-roofed houses. There is usually the same repeated element in his work: tall walls, windows, balconies, rooftops.
I was interested in this idea of trying to capture the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, of seeing a place for the first time, and being blinded by its light. When one of the characters in my novel, Agata, arrives in Jaffa for the first time, she is first struck by the harshness of the sunlight. She feels trapped in a place of perpetual summer. Like all of the characters in my novel, she is homesick.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Rachel Ake’s first design for the cover was almost perfect. It was very close to the final cover, and it was so beautiful. One of my only suggestions was to add the silhouette of the bird at the top. While the main themes of the book revolve around the house itself, the bird is another important element of the book. One of the major characters, Bassam, raises pigeons on the roof of the house in Talbiya. When his family must flee the house, in the Nakba, he opens the cages, and the birds fly off. This image of the birds in flight returns later in the book, it becomes important. I knew I wanted to hint at its significance in the cover, so I sent Rachel images of Matisse’s cut-out birds as inspiration, and she incorporated the idea beautifully into the final cover. Now there is a bird flying above the house, on the edges of the cover, and it feels exactly right.
What was it like seeing the finalized cover for the first time?
Seeing the final cover for the first time made the book feel real. It wasn’t just a word doc on my computer anymore, it was going to be a book out in the world. It was a very exciting (and slightly terrifying) moment! I absolutely loved it when I saw it. I remember I was in the supermarket getting groceries when I got the email, and I caused a minor traffic jam in C-Town. I got my apples and almonds and cauliflower and chickpeas, and ran back home to stare at the cover.
How does the cover convey what the book is all about?
I think the cover does a wonderful job of conveying the essence of the book. I loved how colorful it is, a bit dreamlike, representing a house of fantasy and memory. The geometry of the different parts of the cover also conveys something about the structure of the book, with its sprawling cast of characters and its many storylines. Rather than one unified representation of a house on the cover, it is more fragmented, layered, suggesting that there is not one single narrative in this book, but rather a multiplicity of voices and stories. I like the color scheme, too. The cover is made up of purples and dark greens and deep red rooftops and patches of black, and a yellow sky. It feels slightly surreal. These aren’t the actual colors of a home in Jerusalem. That fits with the atmosphere of the book, of the house as a haunting presence.