Rebecca Winterich-Knox’s debut novel, Bodies of Water, is a gothic domestic drama about grief, betrayal, and the secrets that surface when two families reunite at an ancestral seaside estate. Set over one week on the Massachusetts coast, the novel follows seven characters reckoning with loss, shifting relationships, and the histories that bind them together.
Winterich-Knox holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. Bodies of Water will be released by Zando on June 15, 2027. It is available for preorder now.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Bodies of Water, designed by Ash Tsai. Below, Winterich-Knox discusses drawing inspiration from the New England coastline, creating a sense of suspense through landscape, and how two nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings were transformed into the novel’s stormy seaside cover.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t spend too much time thinking about cover design until the novel was nearly finished, and then I began to get excited about the possibility of a cover that offered the reader a glimpse of the novel’s scenery. Bodies of Water takes place in a coastal town on the North Shore of Massachusetts, and I love how the jacket portrays the rocky cove where much of the book’s drama unfolds. I knew I wanted a color palette that evoked the feel of New England in late spring, and to me, the rich blues and varied earthen shades in Ash Tsai’s design call to mind a season of unpredictable weather and lengthening days.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I’m grateful to have found such willing collaborators at Zando. My editor, Caolinn, had an initial conversation with me about my vision, and then Zando’s editorial director, Masie, worked closely with me and my agent to make sure that we landed on a cover that was a perfect fit for the novel. We wanted something that captured the book’s sense of suspense, while also gesturing toward the quieter questions about intimacy and grief that the novel poses. Our conversations helped me realize that I preferred for the design to focus on BOW’s landscape, rather than its characters—for me, this lent a universality to the jacket, while maintaining an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was absolutely staggering! I couldn’t be more impressed with how Ash blended two gorgeous paintings (“Cave of the Ris under the Ferruginous Cliff, Douarnenez, August 1876” by Emmanuel Lansyer and “Castle in Scotland, 1910” by Thomas Moran) to create such a unique design for the jacket. It was a joy to share it with my family and friends.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
At its heart, Bodies of Water is a book about relationships—familial, romantic, adversarial—as well as its characters’ relationships to their environment. The novel spends a week with seven characters as they gather in a Victorian beach house to process the death of a matriarch, navigating life after metaphorical (and literal) storms. For me, the cover calls to mind a scene from the very end of the novel, in which two previously solitary characters share a moment of reflection and catharsis.
While the book takes place in a contained setting over a short period of time, the jacket has helped me to visualize the larger world that the characters occupy, as well as how the week’s revelations will continue to affect them. I hope it will do the same for readers.